


More Deaths Than One Must Die

by OfWilsonDreams



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: 74th Hunger Games, Canon Compliant, Canon Disabled Character, Canonical Character Death, Careers (Hunger Games), Character Death, Death, District 1, District 10, District 11, District 12, District 2, District 3 (Hunger Games), District 4, District 5, District 8, F/M, Gen, Hunger Games Tributes, Hunger Games-Typical Death/Violence, Mentors, Oscar Wilde quotes, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Quoting from the Ballad of Reading Gaol because I can, This is the Hunger Games there's a lot of death, Watching the Hunger Games from the Mentors' Seats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-10-30 12:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10876365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfWilsonDreams/pseuds/OfWilsonDreams
Summary: Everyone in Panem has to watch the Hunger Games. Each year, 23 people watch the Games from a different perspective to everyone else: the mentors who watch their tributes die.





	1. Part One: Tyde, District Four

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lorata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorata/gifts).



> This story is a multi-chaptered fic in thirteen parts: each part from a different POV. Tags and characters will be added as the story advances. This story is for Lorata, whose writing made me go back to the Hunger Games and re-read it thinking about the mentors watching their tributes, able to help - sometimes - but not to save them.

Wattie is handsome. Not as handsome as Finnick, and older: they'll never again put a 14-year-old in the Arena. District Four learned that the hard way. Finnick is still paying for the lesson.

The Gamemakers like to have a narrative. The Career mentors try to provide one.

Mags understood that. This was Tyde's third Games in the mentor seat, his first without Mags either in the other mentor seat or fishing for sponsor funds. Mags had a talent - her real one, not the driftwood-carvings she had done for the Capitol: she could see the story the Gamemakers intended to play.

Most years, the Career tribute who wins is the villain, the one the Capitol fans have loved to hate. When the Gamemakers want a hero, they skew the games towards the outlier districts, pick a handsome boy or a winsome girl and make the odds in their favour.

Some of those years, a Career tribute wins anyway. The Gamemakers aren't pleased, and the Games after those years are always lethal for Careers. It's only the outlier districts who suppose that who wins is decided purely inside the Arena.

Tyde and Sealie and Finnick have sent the tributes to bed: Finnick still isn't going to be allowed to be a full-time mentor, but until both the Four tributes are dead, or until the end of the Games if Four wins, he can spend some of his valuable time in the mentor room, backup for Tyde or Sealie, and some more of his valuable time in the sponsor room, winning funds for their tributes.

Four doesn't have as many living Victors as Two, but they have enough that no one has to be a mentor two years running, even though Annie can't mentor and can't schmooze and after her stroke Mags can't come to the Capitol at all now and Finnick isn't allowed because the Capitol wants him in other ways.

Tyde stops thinking about this. If he thought about it too hard, he might not want Wattie to win. And even looking at Finnick, knowing how Finnick's time is spent in the Capitol. he wants Wattie to live.

“What's the story?" he said, just as Mags would have said it. "How are the Gamemakers going to play it this year?"

"Starcrossed lovers," Finnick said at once.

"Too obvious," Sealie said.

"Something I found out," Finnick said. "Cinna wasn't assigned District Twelve. He asked for District Twelve."

Neither of them ask how Finnick knows. Sealie said, "Maybe he just had the fire idea and wanted to use it for the coal district."

"He told the Twelve tributes to hold hands," Finnick said. "He wanted them to look like partners when they were first on display. And that was before the boy came out with that touching love story."

The District Twelve Male tribute isn't especially tall or handsome, but he is powerfully built; he and the District Twelve Female tribute, the one who volunteered for her sister, both spent their time on the basic survival stations in the training room, neither of them going near the weapons, but the boy got a decent score and the girl got a spectacular one. The Gamemakers aren't easily impressed, and the girl must have something to show beyond her naive, giggly pleasure in lamb stew and jewelled dresses.

"Get them into the Career pack," Finnick said. "Either or both. Separated would be better. Haymitch will have told them both to run, but nothing would spoil the story of the devoted lovers better if one of them's killing outlier tributes with our kids, and the other's crying his eyes out because his girl turns out to be a killer bitch."

They don't know for sure what will be in the Arena, but as mentors they can make educated guesses from the training stations: the tributes can learn about plants, snares, camouflage tricks. It's going to be wilderness. That often gives the advantage to Four (or, one infamous year, Seven): but both the District 12 kids look well-fed, which means both of them have access to some other source of food than their district rations. District 12 is surrounded by wild land: it's not a stretch to suppose one of them is a hunter.

Sealie nodded. "We tell them, get District Twelve into the alliance. One of them. The girl if possible, the boy if not."

How much of this had the Gamemakers planned? Tyde knows better than to ask this aloud. He had been as moved as any Volunteer when District Twelve Female ran forward at the Reaping and volunteered to save her little sister. Surely that couldn't have been planned.

But suppose it had?

Suppose District Twelve Male's little crush on the girl hadn't gone as unnoticed as he thought it had. Suppose the Gamemakers had known how the girl would react when her little sister was selected. Suppose the Gamemakers intended the 74th Hunger Games to be the story of the starcrossed lovers from District Twelve, one of them to win the Games and lose their love, one to die tragically in the Arena. In this narrative, the Careers are villainous background and final-showdown material: the Gamemakers may intend one of them to survive to the end, so that the final showdown can be villain against hero, but if they do, the Career survivor isn't meant to be Four: neither of the Four tributes are cast as villains. Wattie is a stern, honest young fisherman, determined to survive: Dolph is a fierce young shark, clean and sharp-toothed.

If this is the narrative planned, then both of the District Twelve tributes have to die early, shameful deaths, at the hands of District Two or District One. Either Wattie or Dolph can then be the hero-figure in the final one-on-one combat that ends the best Games.

Tyde didn't say any of this out loud. The Gamemakers can and do monitor everything in the Tribute Tower. What he did say was "Cinna _asked_ for District Twelve?"

Finnick grinned. "As soon as he qualified as a Games stylist: months ago."

The Gamesmakers start planning each Game as soon as the previous one is over. They may have been looking out for an outlier couple they could trap into coming to the Arena together for that long. Or even longer.

Tyde and Sealie tell Wattie and Dolph together the next morning, to emphasise the importance of it in their strategy: get one of District Twelve's tributes into the Career alliance, make sure she - or he - kills at least one other tribute while they're with the pack: and hunt the other District Twelve tribute down and kill him - or her - as early as possible in the Games.

They're good kids. They don't ask why. Tributes don't need to know the narrative.

“Live," Tyde said to Wattie, on the airfield before they said goodbye. "Live and come back to us. Do what you have to do. We'll take care of the rest."

The mentor room in the Tribute Tower is in the basement. When twenty-three mentors are sitting in it, each with two screens in front of them (except for Haymitch, the lone District Twelve mentor, who has three) it always feels so crowded Tyde doesn't know how he'll stand it, except that he also knows that within an hour of the Games beginning. half the mentors will have left.

One screen automatically shows the live feed from the Games: a mentor can alter it, watch any tribute or group of tributes they want to, but the default it shows is where the Gamemakers think the main action is, and that's always worth knowing.

The other screen follows the mentor's tribute, for as long as the tribute lives. Haymitch has two screens either side of the main one. Most years, he shows up drunk and his tributes die in the bloodbath. Some years he shows up sober, and his tributes die on the first or second day.

Wattie knows what to do in the first minute of the Games: leap down from his pedestal, pick up the first weapon he can find, and fight his way to the Cornucopia, killing whatever tributes he can on the way. The one constant in the Arenas is the ring of pedestals with the Cornucopia in the center, so Wattie and Dolph have long since planned out how they can end up together at the Cornucopia without accidentally killing the other one on their way.

Wattie jumps down and runs, sweeping up an axe and landing it in some girl's skull and running on. District Eleven Male is also running for the Cornucopia - he's the biggest tribute this year, but he never looked like a fighter. He and Wattie are going to intercept, Wattie's axe will take off District Eleven Male's arm, and no matter how big he is, he's going to drop to the ground and bleed out.

Wattie's axe swung.

District Eleven Male swung away from the axe like a tree swaying and Wattie stumbled and District Eleven Male yanked the axe out of Wattie's hand and hit him with it. The sound cracks through Tyde's headphones like sea-ice cracking in the spring, that loud, that final.

Wattie's screen went dark. Tyde stared.

For a moment, he thought something had gone wrong with the screen, a fault in the equipment, he is about to stand up and scream for a technician to fix it.

But he had seen his screen go dark like that twice before. He has never before had a tribute die in the bloodbath, but he has never brought a Victor home to District Four.

Not this time either.

Wattie's dead.


	2. Part Two: Cecelia, District Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecelia of District 8, watching the Games for a while from the mentor's seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The vilest deeds like poison weeds  
> Bloom well in prison-air:  
> It is only what is good in Man  
> That wastes and withers there:  
> Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,  
> And the Warder is Despair.

Cecelia hugged Moreen goodbye in the Tribute Tower: "We won't be allowed to touch on the airfield," she explained - "I might be passing you something to use in the Arena."

Moreen is seventeen, friendly, eager to learn, worshipful of Cecelia. She remembered Cecelia's win, or said she did: she remembered the Food Parcels they had got twelve years ago. She's determined to get through the Arena and be another winner for their District: she's spent time at the survival stations, learning plants and snares and fire-making.

Moreen doesn't remind Cecelia at all of either of her daughters, and this is good. Cecelia knew when she married Serge that the Capitol Gamemakers would have one or more of their children in the Arena when they were reaping age: they would want the narrative of the Victor who watches her children strive to become another Victor.

Moreen has a chance, Cecelia isn't lying to her: the same chance any outlier has if they stay hidden, stay quiet, stay secret, let the other tributes kill each other, and wait it out til the end. Cecelia hid and collected plants and waited and used a Feast to poison the other four survivors: she killed the tributes of four mentors, all of whom she's later come to know as not-quite-friends.

There is a curious comradeship in the mentors room at the start of the Games. Every mentor hopes their kid is coming home. Every mentor - even the Careers - know their kid probably won't make it.

Cecelia sits down next to Ninon, and glances at her: Ninon won the Games five years before Cecelia, but still looks younger. Ninon never married, never had kids: she stays inside her house in the Victor's Village most of the time. Her tribute Baya is thirteen, a quiet slip of a boy who doesn't stand a chance. Ninon was surprisingly good with him, from what Cecelia overheard: Baya is going to jump down from his platform and run directly for the Cornucopia while all the tributes are fighting.

He'll die fast at least. It's not what Cecelia plans to tell her kids if they get Reaped at Baya's age, but that's her business: she knows and understands Ninon's strategy, and she knows from past Games that Ninon will support her with the sponsors once Baya is dead. Ninon is sitting back in her chair, eyes on her screen, showing what Baya sees: a wooded Arena, a lake, long green grass between the pedestal and the Cornucopia with supplies scattered through it.

Other mentors have a mug of coffee to hand, the hellish black brew they serve from the machine in here: but Ninon has nothing. Ninon knows that in a few minutes her screen will go dark and she'll get up and leave.

Countdown ends.

Cecelia leans forward, as if she could propel Moreen off the pedestal. and just as they'd planned, Moreen jumps and runs towards the woods, paying no attention to anything behind her, not stopping to pick anything up.

Baya doesn't move. Across the screen the tall girl from District Twelve runs fleet as a deer to grab a backpack: Baya is frozen, not moving, as in front of him children die. The Careers have reached the Cornucopia, and District One Female picks up a shining silver bow.

Cecelia is watching Moreen run through the woods, but the main screen is still at the bloodbath, and she sees District One Female bend the bow and fire the silver arrows, target practice. Baya has never moved from his pedestal. Cecelia knows when Ninon's screen goes dark because Ninon stands up - other mentors are standing, the room is beginning to be filled with the bustle of people leaving - and laughs a little, sadly.

"Happy hunger games," she says to Cecelia, and goes.

Moreen runs. She's in pretty good shape and Cecelia has explained how she should pace herself, but still work on getting as far as possible from the Cornucopia the first day. The Careers will form a hunting pack and go looking for prey, and Moreen has to get far enough away that she won't be among the first found.

Moreen stops just before it gets dark, and spends a little time scouting around for supplies and shelter, before she sits down on a fallen tree. Cecelia had warned her against moving on in the dark on strange terrain: too easy to sprain her ankle or tread on something bad. The clothing the Gamemakers have given the tributes is dark and warm: sitting still in the dark is probably as good a move as any.

On the other screen, the main narrative for the Games, the Career pack has formed: District Four Male was killed in the bloodbath by the big tribute from District Eleven, who's also done a runner - in a completely different direction from Moreen, Cecelia is relieved to see. The five Career volunteers have added District Twelve Male to their number - the boy who'd declared his love for his other District Twelve tribute live on stage. Well, he'd come across as friendly and personable and he was built strong.

District Three Male seems to be talking himself into an alliance with the six, too. The Cornucopia has plenty of food this year, lots of supplies to eat and fight with: the Gamemakers must be planning a straight combat Arena this year, one-on-one fighting between well-fed champions.

The six fighters set off to hunt, leaving District Three Male behind to protect the Cornucopia. From the crosstalk between them, they think they're tracking District Twelve Female, but unfortunately that means they're heading towards Moreen, too.

This Arena is designed to get cold as soon as the false sun goes down. The half a dozen kids in the Career pack are okay: they're keeping moving. The Cornucopia has supplied those see-in-the-dark glasses.

Moreen is sitting still on her fallen tree, hugging herself. A camera has focussed in on her face. She looks cold and miserable. Cecelia glances at funds: low as usual, at the start of the Games. Ninon will be down talking to the sponsors, talking up Moreen's strategy of running and concealment, reminding them that Cecelia won in an Arena very like this.

There is enough to send Moreen a blanket, but that will wipe out their funds completely. Tonight Ninon may manage to score some more funds, enough to buy a survival bag and even a canteen for water, and then Moreen can find herself somewhere to hide for as long as possible.

Moreen must have heard something. She got down from where she was sitting on the tree, and huddles closer to the ground. Cecelia leans forward, switches the view to infra-red.

Moreen is gathering kindling for a fire.

She can make one - she learned how at the survival stations: all she needs is a steel and a flint. But making a fire now is stupid, stupid.

Stupid.

Cecelia sat back in her chair, and watched. On the main screen the Career Pack are moving cautiously through dark woods. They don't know where they're going, they're scouting for signs of fleeing tributes.

Off in the distance on the main screen, they see fire.

It shows a long way through the darkness. The Careers go slow and quiet: evidently they think it might be a trap. Cecelia marks that down as an idea to tell her children: set a fire, lure the Career pack in, run away.

The close-up camera shows Moreen not running: she's built a small fire, she's sitting by it, feeding it with pieces of wood. She looks warmer and happier already. Cecelia is, in a distant kind of way, grateful for that. Moreen should have a little warmth and happiness before she dies.

The Career pack materialise out of the forest like dark, lethal, laughing ghosts. They strike and strike again, and leave Moreen dying by the campfire. They move off.

All Cecelia knows is that Moreen isn't dead yet: she's lying in pain and fear and a pool of her own blood, the firelight illuminating the side of her face. On the main screen, the Career Pack are standing under a tall pine tree, talking quietly. They know she's dying. They're just waiting for the cannon. No, they know she's dying slow: they're talking District Twelve Male into going back and finishing her off.

The main screen camera begins to rise, zooming up the tree. There's a dark mass on one of the branches, invisible from below. The camera zooms in on it. In a survival sack of the kind Cecelia had hoped to buy for Moreen tomorrow, tied to the branch by her belt, is District Twelve Female. She can hear the voices from below: she knows her District partner, the one who claimed to love her, is in the Career Pack.

Cecelia props her chin on her hands. The Gamesmakers love an interesting twist on the same old narrative of twenty-four children trying to kill each other. She glances over at Haymitch, who is watching his three screens without any expression at all on his face.

District Twelve Male is talked into going back to kill Moreen. Cecelia watches on both screens as briefly and for the last time the main narrative touches District Eight: the camera shows how District Twelve Male pauses, as if not sure how to do this, as if he's never killed before, but he pushes his knife into her throat and the cannon fires (and her screen goes dark and Moreen is dead) and the main narrative shows how District Twelve Male jumps back in surprise and then remembers to retrieve his knife - and then a quick reaction shot - the faces of the Career Pack, all of them looking unspeakably satisfied, and District Twelve Female, huddled in her survival bag, high above them all, hearing everything.

Cecelia gets up slowly. Slowly. Moreen never really stood a chance, and as deaths in the Hunger Games go, it was quick. And Cecelia learned from it, as she's tried to learn from all of the District Eight deaths since she won: someday she will be teaching her children how to survive the Arena.

  
  


 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for Lorata. This story is a multi-chaptered fic in thirteen parts: each part from a different POV. Tags and characters will be added as the story advances. One chapter a day til it's done.


	3. Part Three: Precious, District One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Precious of District 1, wanting Glimmer to win the Games so much it feels like need.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some kill their love when they are young,  
> And some when they are old;  
> Some strangle with the hands of Lust,  
> Some with the hands of Gold:  
> The kindest use a knife, because  
> The dead so soon grow cold.

May the odds be ever in your favour.

Precious, who was once Peri until she turned thirteen and the Academy renamed her, wants Glimmer to be the Victor more than almost anything. Gloss and Cashmere were District One's last Victors, and Cashmere won a decade ago: Precious was her mentor in the 64th Hunger Games.

Glimmer was once Galiena: she too was renamed and transformed. She is beautiful, she is deadly, she is new: if she wins, she will be the Capitol's delight. Sponsors will pay for the chance to be first in line. Gloss and Cashmere are romancing the sponsors tonight: as Precious sits in the mentor seat and takes her first mouthful of the black, black coffee she only drinks during the Games, she can see District One funds already piling up.

Glimmer's odds aren't good, for a Career tribute: she's an excellent all-rounder, skilled with both close-hand and distance weapons, but with no really stand-out weapons skill. What Precious told her to show the Gamemakers, in their private session, was how good she could look with any weapon pulled off the racks: Glimmer makes death an art form, she makes killing look beautiful.

The Gamesmakers aren't allowed to sponsor tributes, but they enjoy a new District One winner as much as any wealthy Capitol citizen.

All mentors want their tributes to win, but First District mentors have a crystal edge to their want that makes it need.

Marvel is a handsome boy, and Precious will be glad for Gloss and for Malachite, who is sitting in the other mentor's chair this year, if he wins. They'll share the sponsor money when they can, they'll split it fairly when the Career pack splits: but Malachite won the 49th Hunger Games, and the Capitol have long since sated themselves on him.

If the Gamemakers are looking for lust this year (and they should be: oh, they should be: since Finnick, there have been no really beautiful winners) then Glimmer's rival is the District Twelve Female tribute. Cinna is very, very good: Precious now thinks District One should have made him an offer when he graduated, even though District One never takes just-qualified stylists. And Haymitch made her catch everyone's eye at the interviews, with that story from his male tribute about being in love with her. The Gamemakers gave her that mysterious 11: they are setting up a rivalry, District Twelve's beauty against District One's.

The Twelve-girl must die during the bloodbath, Precious and Malachite agreed: a swift unromantic death, nothing showy or tragic. Get to the Cornucopia, they told Glimmer - she runs faster than Marvel - find a distance weapon, and pick Twelve-girl off like any cut of meat, along with any of the other meat tributes that catch your eye. Don't make her look like a special target. Later, you can finish off District Twelve Male. They shouldn't even die at the same time.

Precious watches, unblinking - her eyes are always dry and stinging during the Games - and forgets to drink her coffee. The Twelve-boy is acting like a Career: he's picked up a shield and he's using it like a bludgeon, both for weapon and defence. As far as Precious can tell, he doesn't kill anyone and he doesn't attack any of the Careers.

(Four-boy is killed by Eleven-boy. Precious glances over as Tyde gets to his feet, and gives him a sympathetic nod: good policy, to stay polite with other Career mentors. There's always going to be another Games.)

Glimmer is standing in the mouth of the Cornucopia, carrying a bow. She must have impressed the Gamemakers with her shooting: the bow is an iconic weapon, clearly made for Glimmer personally, silver to match the stylist's vision of the First District, a beautiful weapon for a beautiful tribute.

Glimmer picks off three meat tributes with her silver bow, but none of them are District Twelve.

Twelve-girl has run for it. Twelve-boy is being welcomed into the hunting pack by Four-girl, who makes much of his skill battering opponents with the shield he picked up. Glimmer smiles, beautifully, and joins Four-girl, sliding in against Twelve-boy and running her hands down his biceps, smiling with all of her teeth and whispering in his ear that he looks good enouh to eat.

Glimmer nips the Twelve-boy's ear just as she says “eat”: the main camera focusses for a moment on Glimmer's perfect teeth closing in the lobe of the Twelve boy's dough-pale ear, and Precious lets herself be distracted a moment by the thought of the sponsors who'll want to imagine Glimmer doing that to them, in days to come when they can buy District One's newest Victor.

Twelve-boy copes quite well, considering: he doesn't squeal and he barely flinches, and Two-girl prods him under the ribs and says something that probably passes for good-humoured flirtation in Twos.

Marvel and Two-boy are prodding Three-boy. Precious eyes Brutus and Beetee, who are watching their screens expressionlessly: they have clearly fixed Three-boy's joining the pack, but why? Twelve-boy, sure, he's big and strong and he has to be split away from the Twelve-girl he claimed to be in love with. But what's Three-boy got to offer? Brains, that's what, and brainy tributes shouldn't ever be let into the career pack, there's too much risk of their thinking the smart thing to do is to knife the Careers in their sleep.

Three-boy is making wheedling promises about keeping the Cornucopia stores safe from trespassers, and Marvel laughs and slaps him on the shoulder, good-humoured One banter while Two-boy just glowers equally at Marvel and at the Three-boy. Beetee smiles a little when he sees Precious looking at him, a smile as calculated in its way as Glimmer's. Two and Three have something planned.

The pack eats – there is plenty of food – and then stores supplies in the backpacks. There are empty water-bottles, but the only water-supply is the lake and the river that fills it. There are fishing-lines and creels in the Cornucopia, which means there may be fish in the lake, but Glimmer and Marvel will have more sense than to go swimming: if there are fish there are likely to be things that feed on fish.

Precious thinks of hinting – as Career mentors know how – that an appropriate way to dispose of Twelve-boy once they've killed Twelve-girl will be to toss him in the lake and see if he will be drowned before he's eaten, or eaten alive before he drowns.

After they eat, and the deaths of the bloodbath are painted across the Arena sky, the pack goes hunting, and they make the first kill: wisely, they get Twelve-boy to finish her off. Twelve-boy is now credited with the first kill of the Games after the bloodbath, and the Eight mentor, Cecelia, sighs a little and gets up and leaves. Her tribute was stupid.

The pack hunts round a little more, but anything after Twelve's kill would be anti-climactic: they go back to the Cornucopia and settle down in survival sacks against the cold night.

Worryingly, Precious notes the narrative camera is keen on Twelve-girl: who does know how to hunt, and who has a fair amount of sense, besides being pretty enough for a Victor. The Twelve-girl grabbed a backpack as she fled, and knows how to set snares, and goes back to the Eight-tribute's embers to cook her meat. Then she runs.

For the next two days, nothing. Three-boy is doing his promised wizardry with the mines buried around the pedestals: Ten-boy, who should have been easy meat, has gone to ground, though a sweep will eventually pick him up: Five-girl and Eleven-girl are both – both of them! - hiding near the Career Pack and keeping track of where they go and, to all the Career Mentors' unspoken annoyance, they're managing this spying without being caught. Eleven-boy's location is guessed at by the Pack – he's gone into the swamp area, hiding in the tall grasses – but none of the Pack want to venture in there. Quite right, in Precious's view: the Arena itself may kill Eleven-boy, and if not, he's clearly designated for a final duel between himself and the last Career survivor standing.

On the second day, the main narrative camera is mostly depicting Twelve-girl's struggles to find water as she explores the woods – this Arena is a big one – and Eleven-boy's struggles with the mutts in the swamp. The Career Pack is hunting, but fruitlessly: they get close to Ten-boy once, but never spot him, Five and Eleven's girls are too sly, and Twelve-girl is a long way away by this time.

On the third day, Precious sends Glimmer a gift – a dozen fresh apricots - and makes sure the parachute lands in the direction the Career Pack will have to go, to find this Twelve-girl. The Pack leaves Three-boy behind at the Cornucopia to finish his technical wizardry, and they go hunting – all day, and into the night.

The District Two Careers like to hunt at night. Glimmer and Marvel aren't so keen, but they don't want to separate the Pack this early, and they know the Gamemakers will do something to spice the games up if the Pack don't make a kill soon.

On the fourth day, the Gamemakers send a forest fire. The fire isn't real, exactly – any more than most of the trees are real, exactly, though Precious doesn't pretend to understand how - but it's real enough to kill tributes if they slow down. The Gamemakers are using the fire to herd Twelve-girl towards the Career Pack and let the hunt begin.

Glimmer didn't acquit herself well in the hunt, Precious noticed with annoyance: she tried to shoot upwards into the tree Twelve-girl retreats to, but she misses, her silver arrow is stuck in a branch, and Twelve-girl actually laughs at them, retrieving the arrow herself and waving it tauntingly at the Pack below. Glimmer should have known not to try a shot like that and miss.

The Pack are waiting under the tree as the anthem plays for the fourth time. No new deaths. The Pack will wait all through the night – the Twelve-girl will have to come down eventually, or die of thirst, but the Pack are well-supplied with water and food for several days. So long as Twelve-boy is kept here, the Careers can even take turns going back to the Cornucopia and the lake for fresh supplies: this drama will end when Twelve-boy sees the girl he claimed to love die. Perhaps the Twos can kill her slowly – that would fit Two-boy's image, and Two-girl loves her knives. If it falls to Glimmer, Precious thinks it would be best to kill her quick and messy, though best of all would be to watch as the Twos slaughter her slowly and urge Twelve-boy in for a mercy killing, thus disposing of them both.

Because over the last several days all the mentors have realised what none of the tributes can: the Gamemakers like the Twelve-girl. They won't make her win easy, and almost as good as her winning would be her tragic/romantic death, but they _like_ her. The screen that shows the live feed, the main action, is showing the other surviving tributes too – Eleven-boy in the plain of grasses below the Cornucopia plateau, surviving on raw grains and crabs: Eleven-girl darting from tree-branch to tree-branch, keeping the Career pack in sight but always staying hidden herself: Five-girl slinking and hiding: Three-boy with his tongue clenched between his teeth, working miracles with electronics: but the main feed, which ought to be mostly about the Career pack, Ones and Twos and the surviving Four, is focussed instead on the Twelve-girl with flashes of the Twelve-boy.

Which is why Precious sees at once, and lets Marvel see it as well, that Twelve-girl is doing something unthinkable, and their tributes have done something very stupid. They have both gone to sleep under the tree: Two-boy is keeping watch, a distance away: Two-girl and Four-girl and Glimmer and Marvel are all asleep, cuddled together to keep warm, honestly asleep like tired children, under the tree in which their target is sleeping too, and Twelve-boy asleep with his head on Two-girl's knee.

Why not? Twelve-girl's only weapons are the knife that Two-girl threw at her in the bloodbath and the silver arrow that Glimmer wasted on the tree. She has matches, but she can't start a fire without killing herself first. Why not sleep, while the Pack's bond is still strong?

Why not? Because above the sleeping Pack, high on a branch above them, so high they never saw it, is a lumpy trackerjacker nest. And who is clinging to the branch, sawing at the wood with the Two-girl's knife, ripping her burn-blisters open and bleeding, camera focussed in to see the effort and the pain in the Twelve-girl's pretty face -

Precious tries to send her tribute a gift, anything, the cheapest piece of bread, something to wake her, but is not altogether surprised to find there's a temporary hold. The Career pack will wake before the trackerjacker nest falls, or they won't. They'll escape, or they won't. The Gamemakers want their audience to be in suspense, not to see the Career pack awakened by a fortunately-timed breakfast.

The nest falls. Two-boy sees it: he yells Two-girl's name and throws something at her, and Two-girl doesn't wait to look: she leaps up and runs, as Two-boy is running, as Twelve-boy has woken when Two-girl jumped up and he's running, and Marvel is running, they're all running towards the lake, but Four-girl woke up a moment too late and the trackerjacks are on her, but she's running, training wins over pain -

Only Glimmer isn't running, because Glimmer can't run, because the trackerjacker nest landed almost on top of her and she is covered with them, stinging her, stinging her, stinging her.

Glimmer takes a long time to die, and it's not a pretty death. Not at all. When the screen goes dark, Precious finds she can't even move. All her muscles are frozen. She'd always known that she might not bring Glimmer home: but she hadn't thought of this. She sits in front of her screens, one dark, one still showing the main feed, the story going on without Glimmer in it.

The Twelve-girl climbs down from the tree. She takes the silver bow and the arrows. She does it clumsily, she's stung in places herself. But she holds the bow as if it was made for her.

Not for Glimmer at all. And Glimmer is dead.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for Lorata. This story is a multi-chaptered fic in thirteen parts: each part from a different POV. Tags and characters will be added as the story advances.


	4. Part Four: Sealie, District Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It's up to you,” Sealie said. “I can't make you, I wouldn't try. But I looked you over, after you brought in that blue shark, and I think you can win. You're good-looking, you're strong, and you're a killer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like two doomed ships that pass in storm  
> We had crossed each other’s way:  
> But we made no sign, we said no word,  
> We had no word to say;  
> For we did not meet in the holy night,  
> But in the shameful day.

Sealie won her Games the year the Capitol built a dry Arena. There was almost no water, there was almost no fuel, and there was almost no food. Mags was her mentor, and Mags had told her then: “Live and come back to us. Whatever you have to do.”

She had killed for water, killed for food, killed for warmth. Sealie's kill count had been the highest in District Four from her win til the year Finnick won.

She chose Dolph the day she saw her girl bring in a blue shark, spearkilled.

Half a year before the Reaping, she'd gone out in her own small _Deepfinder_ , just her and Dolph, and they moored near the Rock and Sealie declared that they should just spend the day sunbathing – while she stripped down to her skin, nodded to Dolph, and they both slid naked into the water without a splash.

The Cave of the Victors is the only place in District Four that the Victors are certain isn't monitored. At every high tide, it's underwater: even the entrance isn't visible unless you sail right past it at low tide. There is a much bigger dry cave close to the Victors' Village that the Victors use for beach barbeques every summer after the Games are safely over, and they also call that the Cave of the Victors, but they assume that it too is bugged, like every house in the Victors' Village.

“I didn't even know this was here,” Dolph said. Clambering into the cave is awkward, over wet rocks slippery with weed, but inside, there's a steep vent up to the sky: there's even a tiny patch of sunlight, if you pick the right moment.”

“Most people don't,” Sealie said. “We call this the Cave of the Victors. I brought you here because I want you to volunteer for the Hunger Games this year.”

Dolph stared at her, stared around her, rubbed her ears as if she wondered if lingering water had made her deaf. “I thought...” she said faintly, “I thought that was up to me.”

District Two has their Center, District One has their Academy: their tributes are trained, polished, honed. District Four has a training program, encouraging kids of Reaping age to learn survival skills and fighting skills, and every year there's always a group of the older kids, near the end of their Reaping years, standing ready to Volunteer at need.

“It's up to you,” Sealie said. “I can't make you, I wouldn't try. But I looked you over, after you brought in that blue shark, and I think you can win. You're good-looking, you're strong, and you're a killer.”

Dolph's eyes went wide -

“You didn't need to kill that blue,” Sealie said. “They don't attack boats, they don't usually attack divers unless the divers attack them first. Sure, they eat food fish, but there's plenty for all of us. Most divers won't kill a shark that's not a threat. You did.”

She sat down on the sandy floor of the cave, and looked up at Dolph. “It's okay,” she said quietly. “I'm a killer too.”

Dolph sat down next to her, a seventeen-year-old girl with wet tangled hair and brown eyes and a bony face and the scarred hands of someone who's been handling nets and hooks and scaled fish for years. She pressed her hands to her face and rocked.

“My brother yelled at me,” she said. “I could have been killed, I didn't need to go after that blue. My dad told me I shouldn't ever do it again. My mom scolded me, even my little sisters told me off. But I knew I could, I knew I could kill it – Do I deserve to die for that?”

“No,” Sealie said, out of her deepest heart. “You deserve to win.” She told Dolph of the risks and hazards of being a Victor, honest with her about what was likely to happen in her first year or two (“You'll be raped. They won't call it that in the Capitol. You'll be required to provide “patrons of the Games” with sex. We've all been through it, and we'll all help you. And then they lose interest. You won't have to do it forever.”) and about the part you had to play, alone in an Arena with a pack of killer children you had to pretend to trust for a while, and a scattered horde of more children you had to kill. (“We don't talk about these things outside this cave. We don't come here often, either. We can't trust the Capitol, and we can't trust the other Districts.”)

“You don't have to Volunteer,” she told Dolph. “But someone must. And of all the kids who'll be eighteen on Reaping Day, you're the one I think might win.”

When Sealie took Dolph's hands to say goodbye to her before the Arena, the remakers had removed all of the scars.

“Live,” she told Dolph. “You can trust Wattie like a brother til you're both in the Final Eight. After that, split the Pack, don't let yourself be the one who kills him, don't let him close enough to kill you. You can trust the messages I send you in the Arena. Pay attention: the only way I'm allowed to communicate with you is by sending sponsor gifts. You can't trust anyone else.”

Sealie didn't think Wattie would make the Final Eight, though she hadn't told Tyde. Dolph jumped down from her platform and ran for the Cornucopia, faster than anyone else, aiming herself like a diver at the harpoon the Gamemakers had left for her. She didn't stop to kill anyone on the way, and missed by inches the chance to kill District Eleven Male for killing her district partner.

Tyde's screen goes dark and just like that, Wattie is dead.

Sealie told Dolph that District Four has to get one – and one only – of the District Twelve tributes into the Career Pack. Tyde told Wattie the same thing. Split the couple up, make one of them kill on the hunt. Even though Wattie's head is split open like a soft fruit, Dolph obeys: she saunters over to District Twelve Male, who behaved himself like a fighter, and who hasn't run, and tells him how good he is with that shield he picked up.

(District Twelve Female ran: it's evident that Haymitch, who usually spends the Games drunk, is _thinking_ this year. He has two tributes, either of them have a chance, and at least, he told them to separate to give them different chances.)

The five surviving Careers know about moving away once the bloodbath is over to let the bodies be picked up: Dolph takes District Twelve Male by the arm, pulling him away from the attentions of the District Two and District One females, and he goes with her. District Two Female and District One Female laugh in each other's faces and follow. District One Male and District Two Male are hauling the little District Three Male with them: that wasn't part of any discussion Sealie had with Beetee, and she'll find a way to hint to Dolph that District Three Male isn't to be trusted.

The pack hunts and makes its first kill. Just as they planned, District Twelve Male makes the final killing stroke and will be credited with the first kill, after the bloodbath. He didn't kill anyone in the bloodbath, though a couple of the kids he knocked down with the shield became easy prey for District Two's knives and District One's spear.

After the Pack had eaten, hunted, and were sleeping, Dolph had taken the first watch, as Sealie had advised her to, because the first watch on the first night looked good – Dolph in the shadows, gazing away from the fire to retain her night vision, proudly enduring the cold as the others huddled in their sleeping-sacks – and was unlikely to require any action: surviving outliers weren't likely to attack the Career pack this early.

District Twelve Male is sleeping between the females from District One and District Two. Trapped between them. He's bigger than either of them, but they know how to fight, and he doesn't. District Two Male has District Three Male pinned down in case he goes wandering off.

Tyde returns: he's got a grip on himself, and he sends Sealie off to get some rest. They'll spell each other when the Pack is sleeping. Only after it breaks, Sealie will be with Dolph til the end of the Games – the very end, she hopes. Dolph's good: she could take on any of the Career pack. (District One Female has that flashy silver bow, but she's not that good with it, and besides, the Gamemakers don't want a final combat to come down to an archer killing the last survivor from a distance. That bow won't last til the end of the Games, Sealie is sure of it.)

Dolph doesn't put a foot wrong. She's running with the Pack, not conspicuous, not villainous: she flirts a little with the boys, but nothing to make the cameras pick her out for the main screen. Where Dolph is good – the swift spear-kill, merciful and deadly – that will shine when the Careers fight at the end of the Games. Meantime, when she kills in the bloodbath, she kills swiftly, using her harpoon: she's a hunter, fierce and fast and innocent.

Until the morning the trackerjacker nest lands next to her, Sealie thinks Dolph can win.

The District One Female is dead in an ugly and spectacular way: the main narrative camera focusses on her. Dolph does everything right to the end: she runs toward the lake, as the other Career kids are running, to get underwater, to splash away the trackerjackers. But she doesn't make it.

Dolph falls in sight of the lake. She lies there on her face, in the long grass, as the trackerjackers land on her and sting her. She isn't even going to be a main item in the story in her death: the District One Female is still being gloated over by camera on the main screen even after Precious's mentor screen goes dark. District Four is just a footnote to these Games, the first they've had to play through without Mags. One dead in the bloodbath like any outlier tribute, one dead in an Arena accident.

In the last moments as Dolph's raw sounds of pain are racking her ears, Sealie remembers the scarred-handed youngster asking, “Do I have to?” in the cave above the sea.

Dolph's screen goes dark. Tyde is standing behind her. Sealie gets up and hugs him hard. “I'm sorry about Wattie,” she breathes, able to say it at last.

 


	5. Part Five: Lambert, District Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> District Ten is the slaughterhouse district: and District Ten tributes know how to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He did not wring his hands nor weep,  
> Nor did he peek or pine,  
> But he drank the air as though it held  
> Some healthful anodyne;  
> With open mouth he drank the sun  
> As though it had been wine!

Some years, Lambert thinks one of the District Ten tributes has a chance. Those are the worst years.

This year, neither of them do. Teresa is only thirteen. She's thin and big-eyed and even if she knows how to kill a veal calf, and all District Ten kids get shown that much before they're twelve, she has no muscles and little stamina. Eduardo is eighteen. He's old enough to have learned how to kill a cow, but he was born with a twisted foot: he can ride, but he can't run.

Isabel is not a good mentor, but this has never mattered. She won the Hunger Games long before Lambert was born, and her Games were bloody: by the time Lambert won, she seemed to have settled into a tired routine of watching her tributes die in the bloodbath and then to drink with Haymitch, the District Twelve mentor, for the rest of the Games.

Teresa and Eduardo are silent and wide-eyed on the tributes' train at first: they watch, warily, as Isabel drinks steadily through their first meal and the after-dinner drinks while they all watch the Reaping of the other Districts, and then Isabel wanders off – Lambert knows, to drink herself to sleep. The Capitol Escort makes a few remarks about the odds being ever in their favor, and when no one reacts, she leaves too.

There is Capitol commentary about the Games, but it's not compulsory viewing, and Lambert switches the screen off. He and the tributes are left with the dark screen and the unnatural comfort and silence of the tribute train.

“Do they ever give us horses?” Eduardo asked.

“No,” Lambert said. Of course the Gamesmakers could do anything, but they were unlikely to provide horses, when only District Ten tributes would be able to ride them.

“Then I don't stand a chance.” Eduardo spoke quite quietly. “Can you help Teresa win?”

Lambert hesitated. Teresa said, into the silence, “I don't stand a chance either.”

Both Lambert and Eduardo looked at her, and she said, not as levelly as before, “Well, I don't, do I? I'm only thirteen. That boy from Two, that other boy from Eleven, either of them could kill me without even trying.”

If District Ten tributes were sent into the Arena with nothing else, their District could send them understanding death. At twelve years old, every child in District Twelve is shown the slaughterhouse, is helped to kill a beast.

“There's always a chance,” Lambert said. He has to say that: the tribute Train is bugged by the Capitol, same as everywhere else. “But you don't have a good chance. That's true.”

“What do we do?” Eduardo asked.

“We'll be on this train for a full day tomorrow,” Lambert told them. “Eat well. Sleep well. When we get to the Capitol, you'll have a few days to get ready for the Arena. I'll think about it and tell you. But for now, all you can do is rest, and eat, and try not to worry.”

Lambert stood up: he bent to take Teresa's hands, and lifted them to his lips. He kissed her left hand, right hand. “I wish it could be different, my dear,” he said. “Go to bed, and sleep. We'll see you at breakfast.”

Eduardo pushed himself to his feet, and stood, with uneasy balance, watching Teresa go. “Can't you help her?” he asked.

“I can try,” Lambert lied, with a blank face. He took Eduardo's hands. “Go in peace, my boy, sleep well. Your courage is beyond reproach.”

He actually intended to do what he could for Eduardo: he had seen Remake do incredible things.

But Remake coldly and politely rejected this, the next evening. “Everyone who saw him Reaped, saw him limping. We'll get him to beauty-zero, of course – but we can't fix his foot, and we wouldn't try.”

What they did do was make Eduardo boots specially adapted to his feet: he would still be lame, but he could walk without each step hurting him. Eduardo was enchanted: he showed off by walking the full length of their main room. He was slow, but he said it really didn't hurt.

Lambert waited through two days of training before he took Teresa up on to the roof, to look at the stars. They walked around the roof, and he pointed at the constellations, talking at random, and then leaned on the rail.

“You're not allowed to kill yourself during the Games, or before the Games,” he told her quietly. “If you try and fail, the Gamesmakers make your eventual death very cruel, very spectacular, to win viewers: if you succeed, the Capitol will kill everyone you love.”

Teresa nodded. Her chin trembled.

“The best I can hope for you is that death comes swiftly. Stay near the Cornucopia. Tempt the Careers to kill you fast. In the first half hour of the Games, numbers count: in the last days of the Games, they would spin out your death. I am sorry, Teresa, but swiftness is all I can hope for you.”

“How will they do it?” Teresa asked.

“You've seen the other tributes train. You know as well as I do which of them are swift killers. My own thoughts would be for you to run near one of the Fours, or the Two boy. But you will be the one who has to decide: it's your death, Teresa. The Capitol will claim it, and we in District Ten will remember it, but it's yours, not theirs or ours.”

Teresa was crying. Not very much: she was a brave child. But her eyes were leaking tears, rubbing streaks down her face.

“We'll have to stay up here until you can stop crying,” Lambert said. “No one can hear us, just here, but we'll have to move on and pretend we were looking at the city lights, and then we'll need to go downstairs and you can't look upset when your face can be seen by their cameras.”

“You could get into trouble, couldn't you,” Teresa said. Her voice wobbled.

“Yes,” Lambert said. “I'm not allowed to advise you how to die. We're supposed to pretend that you can try to live.”

The three Career districts called the tributes from the outlier districts “meat”, and Lambert supposed that was fair. Every year, unless the Gamemakers chose to intervene for the sake of a story they or the audience were enjoying, the winner was one of the six tributes from the districts where children were trained to kill and trained to survive. District Ten would never have been allowed to start their own training school. What Isabel, drunk on blood, drunk on wine, District Ten's first and for years their only Victor, had proposed was that District Ten children learn how to die.

They didn't tell the Capitol, and they didn't tell the children: but every year from then on, the children went on school trips to the slaughterhouses, and by twelve, every child had learned the difference between a living, breathing cow or sheep or pig or goat or rabbit – and the meat it was made of. Every child who stood in the square on Reaping Day knew what it was to be meat for the slaughter, and had learned from the good animals how to die.

Sometimes, there was a District Ten tribute who stood a chance: Lambert had been one of them. But mostly, District Ten tributes died, quietly and swiftly and unobstrusively, making no story for the Games, killing no one, and providing no excuse for Capitol punishment.

“They can't hear what I say,” Teresa said, as they looked out over another Capitol vista.

“This close to the forcefield, no,” Lambert agreed.

“I don't want to die.”

“I don't want you to die either. But when your name was drawn, there were no more choices.”

“No one will remember me,” Teresa said. “My family will, I guess. But they won't talk about me once I'm dead. People don't, not when...” her voice trailed off.

“We will remember you,” Lambert said. “We Victors. We'll come to your burial, and we'll plant flowers on your grave, and we'll remember your name for as long we live. You will be remembered, Teresa. I can't promise you anything else, but I can promise you that.”

When Teresa had stopped crying, Lambert escorted her downstairs. His conversation with Eduardo was a little different, and took place after Teresa was asleep.

Isabel took her place in the other mentor seat, the one for Teresa, but she had wine instead of coffee in her mug and she would be gone just as soon as the screen went dark. Lambert watched Teresa die: even better than he could have hoped. The Gamemakers had provided a silver bow and silver arrows, and the One girl stood on the Cornucopia picking off tributes from the outlier districts like they were targets. Teresa only had to stand still, and the silver arrow pierced her heart.

Eduardo had stepped carefully down from his pedestal as soon as the sixty seconds were up, turned his back on the Cornucopia, and walked towards the stream that fed the lake. He didn't try to take anything with him, and though the One girl shot at him, she missed. Eduardo bent down and picked up the silver arrow as he passed it, and went on, steady and unflinching.

After a while, Isabel got up, taking her wine with her. She looked down at Lambert, and put her hand on his shoulder. She didn't say anything, but lightly pressed with her fingers, and left. She would go to the sponsors' lounge and drink wine with some of her old favorites: she would score a little money, remind them of how Lambert had won: there were young sponsors who were awed by Victors from before the first Quarter Quell, awed enough to give her a little just for her talking to them. They didn't have much money – not enough for food or water – but Eduardo was now picking his way carefully up the rocks of the stream: he wouldn't need to carry water so long as he could stay close to it.

Haymitch from District Twelve got to his feet at the same time as Isabel. District Twelve Boy had joined the Career pack and was getting his ear nibbled: District Twelve Girl was running through the forest. He and Isabel were long-time drinking buddies, and good at playing off sponsors against each other. They headed out of the door together: Haymitch surprisingly sober (but both of his tributes were still alive, unusual for District Twelve) and Isabel not yet quite drunk.

Eduardo walked a long way through the Gamemakers' forest: he didn't go fast, but as he'd said with the special boots made for him, he could walk and it didn't hurt. He was looking round, as if seeking a hiding place, but his watchful expression couldn't mask what he felt to Lambert.

Eduardo had worked hard since he was twelve years old. For six years, he had worked to the limit of his strength, every step hurting him, every day stinking of shit and blood, every day's food not quite enough: the meat from the animals they raised was meant for the Capitol, not for them. For years, he had lived on the cooked mush from tesserae and occasional scraps of better food.

Eduardo had eaten a good breakfast that morning, and for days, he had eaten well and not had to work. Now he walked through a beautiful forest, peaceful and serene, the only sounds birdsong and the buzz of small insects. Anything in the forest could kill him, but Eduardo had accepted that: as he had accepted that if the forest didn't kill him, probably one of the Careers would. But he wasn't hungry, wasn't thirsty, wasn't tired, wasn't hurting: he was keeping his face watchful and still, and he was genuinely looking for a hiding place before he outwalked his strength, near water, not too obvious to searchers: but he was happy.

Lambert kept his face as still and watchful as Eduardo's. He could weep for his tribute – that was allowed – but to smile at his tribute's happiness would be suspicious.

Some funds appeared at the base of his screen – Isabel had done her best – and he checked what they had against the price list of permitted items.

Eduardo left the stream in the middle of pine forests. He showed caution as he climbed the bank, but not enough not to leave tracks. Then he went back down to the stream again, following his own footsteps, and went downstream towards the lake until it was almost dark: he left the stream for the second time where big rocks would let him leave no footmarks, and went into the shadows under the trees. Moving carefully, he edged himself into a patch of briars, and made a space for himself in the middle, big enough to sit down.

Sending a survival sack would wipe out everything Isabel had made, but Lambert thought he might be able to pull a little more if he was properly mysterious about what Eduardo had planned. And if not – well, Eduardo would sleep warm tonight, and Lambert could see from the environment stats that temperature in the Arena was dropping fast.

The parachute slid down through the night, unseen by anyone but District Ten and their boy. The main story of the Games was taking place in another part of the forest entirely, as Lambert could see on the main screen. Eduardo unfolded the survival sack and slid himself into it, curling up inside his nest of briars. For now, he was safe from the other children, and warm for the night. Lambert could let him sleep: if the Arena killed him, Eduardo was as ready for death as he would ever be.

Lambert visited the sponsor lounge every day for the next few days. He netted very little. Eduardo stayed in his nest of briars for two days, and the lethal narrative going on by the main screens, showing the other Districts tangling and killing, passed him by: he heard the Careers pass him on the hunt for District Twelve Girl, but he stayed put and they never saw him. A forest fire was used to herd District Twelve Girl back towards the other tributes, and it passed close enough to Eduardo that he heard it, he must have smelled it – but he stayed in his nest of briars, and the fire passed by on the other side of the stream. , After a couple of days, Eduardo went venturing out only to find water and a little food – there were rabbits in the forest, and Eduardo had the silver arrowhead for a knife and the shaft of the arrow to twist grasses into string for snares. He collected handfuls of berries, drank water from the stream, and was careful to leave no traces of himself near the stand of briars where he slept.

Lambert, when he had the chance to simply sit and watch Eduardo, knew the boy was still happy – hungry, sometimes thirsty, taking no chances for food and water, but well-rested, warm, waiting peacefully for death to find him. There were nine tributes still alive and his own boy, and there was enough drama in the nine alive for the Games narrative not to miss the tenth child.

The Career pack had recovered from the trackerjacker stings, and District Twelve and District Eleven girls had formed an alliance and had plans of their own: Lambert was hardly aware of them, only that there had been no deaths for several days, the Career pack was hunting, and it was time for Eduardo to go. District Ten never tried to roll reserves over from one Games to the next: that was worthwhile only for the Careers districts. But they had a little, enough to buy a piece of bread, and Lambert sent Eduardo a gift.

The parachute appeared over the briar patch, and Eduardo looked up and waited for it: he didn't rush to open it, and when he saw what was inside, it was a moment before he could look up and smile and say thank you, as a good tribute should.

The bread was good District Ten make, not from tesserae grain but from wheat bought from District Eleven: a little greasy, salty, but a solid mouthful of food. Eduardo ate it all, not wasting a crumb, and went to sleep in his nest for the last time.

As usual, the next morning, he packed all of his things up – Eduardo had behaved each day as if he might have to go on the run from where he was hiding, even though he had returned to the same place each time – and as usual, went down to the stream to drink some water. He moved on across the stream to search for other food: picked berries cautiously, so no one would see he had been scavenging there – and found himself a hidden nook under a half-fallen tree to eat his gathered food and twist grasses to make string for snares. He did everything as well as he had done it all of the days before.

But today, when Eduardo was picking berries, he had happened to pick a few from a nightlock bush. A mistake anyone could make. Eduardo ate as always, slowly, carefully, absorbing all the taste and nourishment he could from each mouthful: and when he picked up the nightlock berries, he put them into his mouth as if they were any other fruit. His courage was as great as Teresa's, though he had, as Lambert asked him, not waited for death but walked away from it to let death take him another day.

Eduardo was dead, and the cannon boomed, and there were still some handfuls of fruit he hadn't tasted. District Ten was safe for another year.

Lambert waited for notification that his tribute's body had been picked up. He and Isabel would take Teresa and Eduardo home to District Ten, to bury them with the other children District Ten's mentors had shepherded towards death, and plant flowers on their graves.

And remember them, forever.

  



	6. Part Six: Beetee, District Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beetee knows the Games aren't fair: but he watches anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But why he said so strange a thing  
> No Warder dared to ask:  
> For he to whom a watcher’s doom  
> Is given as his task,  
> Must set a lock upon his lips,  
> And make his face a mask.

Beetee wasn't very fond of most people: he thought being _fond_ of people was a thing that had most likely burned out of him when he killed six teenagers before he was himself fifteen, and then, year after year watched two teenagers he'd been made responsible for, die at the hands of older, quicker, more brutish, less intelligent children.

He loved Wiress, like he'd love a fragile, delicate mechanism that worked superbly when conditions were right and was so easily thrown out of kilter when conditions weren't right: which is to say, about half the time he had to be around Wiress, he was trying not to swear at her because he needed her to work right and he knew why she couldn't.

Wiress thought the girl she was mentoring was a genius. Beetee knew a little bit about the girl's plans - just what he needed to know: she and Beetee tried not to know too much about each other's tributes, in case they both survived for long enough that it would matter - and the girl was smart, smart and cunning and patient.

Kizzef, the boy Beetee was mentoring, was no genius, certainly, but he had an idea of what he could do to the Career pack if he could live long enough to be in the Final Eight, and an idea of how to make the Careers see him as a useful tool, not meat to be killed.

"I'll talk to Brutus," Beetee said, and did: Brutus was no fool. He gave Beetee a long slow thoughtful frown, but agreed that he would talk to his boy Cato, and if Beetee's boy could survive the bloodbath, Cato would see to it that no one else hurt him, in exchange for the protection of supplies Beetee promised _his_ boy could deliver.

"Drop behind one of the pedestals," Beetee advised him, "and stay there til all of the screaming is over. Cato won't kill you, and he should tell the others to lay off you until you've shown you can reactivate the mines to protect their supplies."

"What about Nilley?" Kiz asked.

Beetee shook his head. "You can't worry about her. She and Wiress have their own plans."

Kiz didn't ask again, and so Beetee didn't have to explain that both he and Wiress had seen the very bright, like Kizzef, and the geniuses, like Wiress's girl, go into the Arena with plans and ideas and a burning hope and a will to live... and still have their necks broken or their hearts stabbed out by a child-thug with an uncomplicated sword. Beetee didn't even want to remember their names.

In the bloodbath, District Twelve's boy was laying about him with a shield he'd grabbed up from the long grass. The metal edge of the shield connected with Wiress's girl's skull, and District Two's girl got her with a knife: she bled out on to the long grass.

After the bloodbath, Kizzef stood up, and Brutus's boy stopped Artemisia's girl from killing her. Tyde had watched his boy die in the bloodbath: Sealie's girl was still alive, and Beetee saw Sealie look at him with deep suspicion. District Four never trusted Three, and of course was quite right not to do so.

All Kizzef had to do was stay alive til Final Eight.

There was going to be a problem about that, about Kizzef's plan, Beetee understood as the days dragged by. Usually, Final Eight consists of six Careers and two outliers. Sometimes, one or more of the Careers have been killed before then. When there are only eight tributes left in the Games, then things step up: Careers fight Careers, the last outliers who were providing an interesting alternate story usually get killed then.

District Ten's boy is still alive, but he's not going to be a problem: Ten tributes never are.

District Twelve's boy is still alive, but he's seriously wounded and going to die without any outside assistance.

District Five and District Eleven's girls are still alive, but neither of them look like finalists: District Five is staying alive by sneak-thievery from the Cornucopia supplies and from other people's traps, and District Eleven has been cosying up to District Twelve. She won't last.

District Eleven's boy and District Twelve's girl are both still alive, and they are going to solve a problem for Kizzef, whether he knows it or not. Beetee killed his six victims when they were all together as a pack: Wiress killed her five when the Gamemakers summoned them to a Feast: Kizzef won't be as lucky as that. Five and Eleven and Twelve won't gather at a Feast where the Twos and the One can find them.

Every Arena, no matter what it looks like to the tributes gathered within it, is nothing but a huge and highly-technical box trap. Most of the trees in this Arena aren't really trees, any more than the rocks the tributes walk on are real rocks.. They're constructs, designed to look and feel like they have grown there for decades, even for centuries, to make the tributes believe the Arena is a walled off place in the real world. Kizzef's trap depends on the remaining tributes trusting the trees. But District Eleven's boy isn't going near the trees, and he's big enough that he could break Kizzef's neck if he gets near him. But if by some good chance District Twelve's girl and District Eleven's boy are the last two alive with Kizzef (and it's possible, even now, with both Twos and the One boy the only Careers left), if Twelve shoots Eleven dead from a distance with her bow and Kizzef can lure Twelve back into the woods...

Beetee would admit readily if anyone asked him (no one does) (Wiress can't) that he is not good at perceiving a narrative that the Gamesmakers are constructing. He doesn't see their plans for District Twelve Girl until she sneaks up to the Cornucopia, deserted that morning, even Kizzef gone with the Career pack, and uses an arrow to cut the netting of a sack of apples, to explode Kizzef's mines and destroy the Career supplies.

The Gamemakers want this girl (Beetee glances at Haymitch, who doesn't look back at him: Haymitch is sober, Beetee is used to him drunk) to have a stand-off with District Eleven or District Two at the end of the Games. Win or lose, she will look magnificent, with her silver bow and her terrifyingly accurate arrows.

But Brutus's boy breaks Kizzef's neck, and Beetee's screen goes dark, and Beetee can't even say he's surprised: he can't say much of anything at all. At times like these, he finds himself going as non-verbal as Wiress.

In some Districts, maybe, the drawing is random, the drawing is fair. Beetee supposes that's possible, even though the Capitol can influence the drawing any way it likes. But not in District Three. The smartest, the most brilliant, the most ingenious, the best: they get drawn for the Arena, year after year, and survive only by chance: none of the Victors of District Three were meant to be the winners of their Games, were never popular with the Capitol for winning.

District Three may never be allowed to have another Victor after Wiress, but every year, two of their best children die. Beetee doesn't even want to remember their names.


	7. Part Seven: Malachite, District One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Malachite has never yet presented his own beautiful boy to the Capitol. but he hopes to: his Marvel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some love too little, some too long,  
>  Some sell, and others buy;  
> Some do the deed with many tears,  
>  And some without a sigh:  
> For each man kills the thing he loves,  
>  Yet each man does not die.

Marvel's name was probably Markus before he was thirteen and became one of the pool of beautiful children who might one day Volunteer. Malachite's name was Markus once. It's a common name in District One.

Malachite has never pulled a Victor out of the Games. He wants to: he wants to present his beautiful boy to the Capitol, to know their approval again, their enjoyment, even vicariously.

Marvel is better than Glimmer. Marvel is good with a sword, better with a spear: Glimmer makes killing look beautiful, but Marvel has an unfettered ease about him that Glimmer will never have.

Marvel darts through the bloodbath with his silver spear: he hunts the meat-tributes as if they were schooling fish. He's beautiful, at least as beautiful as the District Four boy who is still dazzling the Capitol years after he won.

Malachite and Precious had agreed that District Twelve Female should die during the bloodbath: Precious had told Glimmer to do it, as she ran faster than Marvel. District Twelve Male was to die separately, something unromantic and messy. But when the bloodbath is over, and the bodies are being collected, it's evident that Precious's girl missed her mark: District Twelve Female got away.

The Career Pack go hunting. Marvel strides through the forest, his spear an extension of his arm. They kill: but the wrong fish. They hunt, but District Twelve Female hides.

If Marvel can kill the District Twos as soon as the Career Pack breaks, the girl, Artemisia's tribute, is too small: Marvel can't look good spearing her, so he needs to kill her off fast. The boy, Brutus's tribute, is inelegantly big: a fight between District Two Male and District One Male as a closing showdown all too often ends with Two beating One. Because the Gamesmakers seldom interfere in that kind of brutally obvious scenario.

The opponent Malachite would like to see for the showdown is District Eleven Male. Handsome in a brutal kind of way, coarse and strong, surviving on strength and endurance: no match for Marvel's long silver spear, but he will look as if the fight might be fair.

The 74th will be said afterwards to be a bad year for Careers, Malachite thinks: one Career dead in the bloodbath, two Careers dead of trackerjacker venom (Malachite nods sympathetically to Precious as her girl screams and dies: he never thought her girl could beat the District Twos, let alone District Eleven, but one must show proper feeling, after all) and then District Ten's rather plain boy eats the wrong berries or mushrooms while scavenging and District Three's even plainer boy has his neck broken for him by Brutus's boy, and suddenly they are in the Final Eight and there are only three Careers left; the Twos, and his Marvel.

Marvel knows what to do: takes off without stopping to pack supplies, without letting the little Two girl have at him with her wicked little knives. Let the Twos hunt the boy Eleven and die for it: Marvel will seek easier prey. Time to pick off the outliers: District Five and District Eleven's little girl are still hiding somewhere. And if District Twelve's girl shows herself, she looks injured from the blast, then Marvel will demonstrate the uses of spear against bow.

Marvel spears the girl from Eleven. And the wicked girl from Twelve, the girl with Glimmer's silver bow and arrows, she kills Marvel.

His beautiful boy.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is such a short chapter! But tomorrow's will be longer.


	8. Part Eight: Harvest, District Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one thinks Rue stands a chance in the Games: no one except Rue herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And what should Human Pity do  
> Pent up in Murderers’ Hole?  
> What word of grace in such a place  
> Could help a brother’s soul?

“You know why your girl hasn't been getting sponsors?” Sass hasn't been on duty since the day of the bloodbath when his District Six Male kid was killed by District One, and so he isn't quite sober but he isn't floating, either: that sentence was quite coherent. Harvest has just come away from a disappointing hour with the pupil sponsors: Sass, like most District Six mentors, never made trusted status. “Your little girl.” Sass looks sad.

No one thinks little Rue stands a chance: no one except Rue herself.

“If I can hide, they can't kill me,” she told Harvest, their first night on the train. “And I'm good at hiding."

“Do you two want to be trained separately, or together?”

“Separate,” Rue said, in chorus with Thresh, Chaff's tribute.

Rue doesn't say why. Harvest doesn't ask. She can guess. Thresh looks like a decent boy, and no one decent would want to kill a little girl.

Harvest's plan for Rue would have been to have her run to the Cornucopia, to die fast: even the most vicious Careers kill the little kids quick in the bloodbath, but the longer a kid survives, the less chance she has of being given a quick death, not an interesting one.

But Rue doesn't want to do that, and the child really is good at running and hiding. She jumps off her pedestal and grabs up a couple of the things in the grass immediately at her feet - a pair of socks rolled up together and a small pack of dried meat - and runs.

She doesn't do what Harvest would have planned out for her to do, if Harvest had supposed Rue would live through the bloodbath: Rue doesn't stay away from the Careers. She goes through the forest with them, every step of the way, high in the trees above them. The sounds she makes in rustling through the branches are covered by the sounds the Careers make, trampling through the woods after dark. Rue passes by the District Twelve Female and the District Five Female, one in a tree and one on the ground, and they never notice her: they're too busy listening for the Career pack.

The first morning after the bloodbath, Rue climbs down from the tree she hid in, looks around at the forest – lifts her chin, and gives the world a truly determined look. The camera focusses in on her. Briefly, the little girl with the determined face is on all of the mentor screens, part of he main narrative: she's survived the night, and most kids her age would already be dead.

She will be – she should be – a magnet for pupil sponsors.

Pupil sponsors are the children of well-to-do Capitol citizens: Reaping age, Harvest would call them if they were District children. They're old enough to have to watch the Games, young enough that their parents don't feel happy giving them access to the mentors lounge at all hours (direct exchange of sex for cash is considered unclassy by most Capitol sponsors, but that doesn't mean it never happens): they usually have a fixed budget that their parents will let them use to sponsor, and while this is usually much, much less than the kind of money their parents would spend on a favorite tribute, it's useful to the outlier districts in several ways.

First, because while Careers usually get trusted mentor status for the asking, pupil sponsors usually don't want to spend money on Career tributes: sometimes they do, but usually they want to give to someone less polished, less vicious, more their own age, an underdog they can feel sentimental about: pupil sponsors aren't good, yet, at making realistic assessments about which tributes are likely to win. And – if an outlier tribute wins – the pupil sponsors are often much less demanding about what they want in return for their gifts.

And one more thing that no one ever admits out loud to pupil sponsors: they'll give to the little ones who survived the bloodbath, and if a District has a cute child like Rue to attract pupil sponsors, the mentors alone get to decide what - and who - the sponsor money is spent on.

The pupil sponsors meet with the trusted mentors every morning during the Games: Harvest rakes in some gifts the first day from a handful of girls who think Rue is adorable, and isn't disappointed: if Rue can stay alive for even a day or two more...

But then the pupil sponsor gifts dry up. No one's interested in the brave little girl who is managing so confidently alone in the forest, her homemade handful of tools and improvised survival equipment.

Harvest looks at Sass.

“Why not?”

When Harvest returns to the mentor room, Rue evidently plans to steal more food from the Cornucopia supplies while the Careers go hunting, but District Three Male, unexpectedly allowed into the Career Pack, has set up an elaborately explosive trap for candidates who try that.

They can't catch her so they can't kill her, but Harvest knows better: there have been Games where out of the last three, two killed each other and left the third the Victor, but not often and the Victor has always been a Career, usually a Two: it's managed like that, District Eleven mentors think, to humilitate the Careers, especially Two, by handing them what they think of as an undeserved victory.

Capitol fans usually want the last scene of the Games to be a duel, a fight to the death between two evenly-matched champions - ideally, a One and a Two. Sometimes, a Two and a Four.

Rue can't win if the Gamemakers have decided that's the narrative they want, and given how many large, strong, well-nourished near-adult teenagers there are in this year's Games, it doesn't look like the story will be of a twelve-year-old girl who somehow killed the last one standing at the end.

Rue can't win. Harvest cannot afford to be sentimental about the child: sentiment is for sponsors. Thresh is District Eleven's one chance for a Victor this year.

Rue can't win – but she's just saved an older tribute's life: District Twelve Female, the girl whose stylist and whose District partner, between them, caused such a stir.

Rue can't win: but she's now in alliance with the girl who half the pupil sponsors have a crush on. District Twelve Female is where all of the kid sponsor money is going, even though Haymitch, District Twelve's only mentor, got trusted status years ago and then blew it within a few years by turning up drunk.

Harvest looks at Chaff who looks back at her, widening his eyes a little. He and Haymitch are old drinking buddies, but Chaff hasn't been drinking at all this Games: he's been watching Thresh, and sending him what help they can afford.

Haymitch hasn't been near the pupil sponsors. If Sass is right, they've been giving District Twelve Female their money just because they like her. And while that by itself won't ever determine the outcome of a Games, the Gamesmakers always have an eye on who the Capitol wants to win.

She's appealling, the District Twelve girl – Harvest judiciously has to admit that – and she has a little sister just Rue's age, everyone who had to watch this year's Reaping knows that.

She's good with Rue, respectful, sharing her food and her equipment, listening to Rue explain the things Rue's learned. She's a declared ally, so she won't kill Rue just so long as the alliance lasts – but it is a truism of the Arena that no alliance lasts long into the Final Eight, let alone – if District Twelve Female and Rue are very, very lucky – the Final Four.

District Twelve Female is good with her bow. Briefly, cautiously, looking at the idea sideways on, not wanting to be too hopeful, Harvest wonders: does Rue have it in her to kill her own ally, if District Twelve Female hesitates to shoot Rue, if by some chance, some bare remote chance, the two of them survive to the end?

Harvest checks District Twelve Female's stats – the public information – and finds her listed among the Kills: Zero group, along with District Five Female and District Ten Male and of course Rue. There was that escapade with the trackerjacker nest, but technically the Arena killed District One and District Four Females.

The Career Pack, all three of them, have split into the Twos, still together, and District One Male, off hunting on his own, when it happens: District One Male finds Rue, out in the open too far from a tree, and shortly after that, Rue is dying, with a spear through her.

Harvest, who had been determined not to care, realises as her sight is blurring that she is crying. She takes gulps of her coffee: yes, all of the mentors have at some time or other wept openly over a tribute, but when they'd invested hope, and everyone knew Rue couldn't win, everyone knew except the child herself.

District Twelve Female sees Rue, sees District One Male, raises her bow and fits an arrow in one smooth motion, and shoots. She kills District One Male like shooting a bird. He's dead, and Malachite's screen goes dark, and he mutters something and gets up wearily. On the main screen the narrative has switched to District Two Male and Female, hunting together, with occasional shots of Chaff's boy Thresh.

Rue isn't quite dead yet. Harvest's screen, the District Eleven feed, is still live. District Twelve Female is kneeling beside Rue and singing to her, and decorating her body with white flowers.

Harvest swallows and presses her hands against her face. She has never seen one tribute do anything like this for another in the Arena. And for Rue, for the child, for the little girl who should have been running and hiding and playing safely in the trees at home.

_Deep in the meadow, under the willow, a bed of grass, a soft green pillow..._

District Twelve Female has a lovely voice. She's singing only to Rue, but to Rue and to anyone else in District Eleven who is still watching the camera feed for Rue. Harvest looks down at the viewing figures, and sees with a blankness beyond shock that the viewing figures, which always fall when a tribute is dying, are rising: only District Eleven and District Twelve can see this feed, see what their tributes are doing, but they're watching as the District Twelve girl, Katniss, Katniss, sings to the child she is covering in flowers, _Here it's safe, here it's warm, here the daisies guard you from every harm..._

Harvest looks down at the list of permitted items on her screen. It's still live. She can send Rue a gift, and Katniss will receive it, and Katniss has earned it. Harvest expected her tribute's death to be ugly, and Katniss has covered the child with flowers, and sung to her as if she were going to sleep.

_And here your dreams are sweet, and tomorrow brings them true. Here is the place where I love you...._

Harvest sends Katniss a gift of bread.

Rue's screen goes dark before the silver parachute arrives. Harvest stands and wanders to the door, pausing as if by accident behind Haymitch, glancing at his screen. Katniss opens the gift, recognises the bread – that was more than Harvest expected – and says aloud her thanks to District Eleven.

Haymitch glances behind him, sees Harvest, shakes his head mutely. He lifts his hand as if by accident to his mouth, and reaches up, as if grasping something. Harvest walks away. She'll be back to help Chaff, but both of them understand Harvest needs some time alone. She is back in their apartment, standing in the room Rue used during her training days, before she realises: Haymitch saluted her.


	9. Part Nine: Artemisia, District Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This one,” Artemisia said, nearly breathless. There are half a dozen girls in the stack of folders their trainers gave the Victors, but of those six girls, Clove shines. She's fast, she's precise, she makes the other beefier girls look oversized and clumsy. But this is a bad year for Careers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with tears of blood she cleansed the hand,  
> The hand that held the steel:  
> For only blood can wipe out blood,  
> And only tears can heal

Except at the specific request of the Capitol, no Victor in Two mentors two Games in a row: everyone, even Brutus, is required to take at least one year off after mentoring a tribute who dies in the Arena, and may take even longer if their tribute is a Victor. The only person outside the Capitol who can suggest to a District Two Victor that they consider mentoring this year or that is the Victor's own mentor. Preparation for mentoring the 74th starts right after the 73rd Games, when the Victors who might be mentors next year start looking at the paperwork for the possible candidates for next year's Games.

Lyme is Artemisia's mentor, and they're both in the pool of eligible mentors that year. Lyme looks over the candidates first – they brought all the paperwork back to Artemisia's house, and Artemisia is sitting on the couch propped up against Lyme's shoulder, sneaking peeks over Lyme's arm every time Lyme makes an interested _hmm_ noise, even when she realised Lyme must be playing her.

“Okay, Misha, you can take a look,” Lyme said finally. “None of them grab me. You want hot chocolate?” She got up to make it, comfortably familiar with Artemisia's kitchen, and left her tribute to leaf through the files of the 17-year-old girls who are, in the estimation of their trainers, good enough to be the the next year's Volunteer.

The moment Artemisia saw Clove's photo, she wanted her. Not in a girl-on-girl way, Clove is small and hard and sharp-edged and never going to be the kind of girl Artemisia wants to kiss, but that would be sort of weird anyway, because unless Artemisia gets to mentor her, Clove is going to age out of the Program and probably get into serious trouble before she's much older.

“This one,” Artemisia said, nearly breathless – she hadn't felt like this since that first-date-that-wasn't with Emory, that first time she'd been out of reach of Lyme's strong arms since she woke up after the Arena.

Lyme picks up the folder and takes a look at Artemisia's choice. She makes an interested _hmm_ noise, and ths time it's for real. Clove's weapons scores, unarmed combat scores, speed, acting, everything rings true. Clove is lethally good, deadly, small, and fierce.

They watch Clove's training videos together. There are half a dozen girls in the stack of folders their trainers gave the Victors, but of those six girls, Clove shines. She's fast, she's precise, she makes the other beefier girls look oversized and clumsy.

Lyme is the only mentor not to make jokes about Artemisia's new crush on her tribute. That's okay.

Besides, it doesn't take long to find out that Clove is unremittingly heterosexual and has a thing for big, beefy guys. That's fine, Artemisia can work with that.

Brutus is the other District Two mentor this year and Brutus picked Cato, for reasons that Lyme says only Brutus will ever understand but Artemisia figures she understands well enough: Cato's scores are high, he got into the Program because he fought and he's fought his way up through this year. He isn't a good match for the Peacekeepers, any more than Clove is, and he'd never make a quarry worker, he'd be in jail or dead the first time someone treated him disrespectfully.

Brutus sees no other future for Cato than through the Games, and he's probably right, except that Artemisia plans for her tribute to win and Clove deserves it more, because why? Because she's Clove, that's all.

Except. Except it's obvious as soon as Cato and Clove are on the train together, the way they don't look at each other, the way they move together without even coordinating it, that these two have some serious chemistry and have had for years.

Artemisia corners Clove on the train and asks her about it. “Can you handle it?”

“I can handle any boy,” Clove says. She stares back at Artemisia fiercely, but Artemisia doesn't let her go, and Clove says finally, “I figured you guys knew. We haven't seen each other since we were in Residential – “ where boys and girls are kept separated to ensure friendships that could destroy a Volunteer's chance in the Arena _don't_ form “ - but we knew each other since we were kids. We both went to the same school, we were the only two kids in our class in the Program.”

“You can handle it,” Artemisia said, knowing her job is to make Clove believe she can. “Question is, what will Cato do?”

“If we're the last two in the Arena,” Clove said. “I'd kill him quick. He'd never get near me.”

This is a bad year for Careers. District Four Male dead in the bloodbath: District Four Female and District One Female killed by insects: District One Male shot by an outlier who turns out to be uncannily good with a bow.

Cato and Clove are the only two Careers left alive: District Eleven Male, District Five Female, District Twelve Female, all have to die. Now is the time in every Games when alliances break and district partners leave each other. Cato and Clove know it: they have years of training and months of instruction and days now of knife-edge knowledge. Only one tribute can leave the Arena alive, the Victor of the 74th Hunger Games, and they are coming dangerously close to having to end the Games by fighting each other.

Right then, just when Artemisia is wondering what she can send Clove to let her know it's time to go hunting solo, the Gamemakers announce a rule change.

Rule changes are never good, never intended to benefit Careers, and this one is huge: instead of one Victor, two. Two Victors from the same District.

On the District Two screen, Cato and Clove turn to each other. Even before they touch, it looks like they are coming together like magnets.

But on the main narrative screen, the District Twelve Female sat up, her mouth opening. “Peeta!”

Brutus took off his headphones. He stared at the two screens. “ - the _fuck?_ ”

Artemisia took off hers. The only mentors left in the room are District Five's Coty, District Eleven's Chaff, and District Twelve's Haymitch. Haymitch looked round when Brutus spoke, but he didn't take off his own headphones and he didn't speak. Chaff is staring at his screen: he looks completely unaware that there is anyone else in the room. Coty's still got her headphones on: she doesn't seem to be listening.

“It's got to be a trap,” Artemisia said.

They're at Final Six. There are _two_ sets of District partners left in the Games. Because although Brutus and Artemisia haven't worried about District Twelve Male since Cato stabbed him deep and left him to die, the District Twelve Male sucker is surprisingly tough: he's not dead yet.

The main narrative screen mostly follows District Twelve Female searching for her district partner, finding him, cleaning his wound, taking him back to a convenient cave, feeding him, kissing him. On both the screens for District Two, Brutus and Artemisia watch Cato and Clove fall for each other all over again. Even when they kill a stray mutt from the swampland, they look like they're enjoying themselves together.

“We should have known,” Artemisia mutters, feeling helpless, which is not her best feeling ever.

Brutus only looks at her. Both of them know – and Cato and Clove should know – that in the Arena, no tribute can afford less than a knife-edged wariness. They should not be playing together like children, like they probably played before Residential, before everyone they knew separated them with a wall so wide that it had occurred to neither tribute to mention that they'd known each other before.

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” Brutus rumbled finally. “We didn't know. They didn't tell us. We gotta make sure they tell us next time.”

The Gamesmakers will never let there be two Victors. The rule-change was announced to squeeze a little more juice out of the star-crossed lovers from District Twelve story. Cato and Clove shouldn't be playing together, they should be hunting: they should have finished off District Twelve Male before his district partner found him, and find District Five Female and kill her, and then separate to find and kill District Twelve and District Eleven.

Cato and Clove don't do that. They spend a day and a night and a day together, while the main narrative of the Games stays with District Twelve. They sleep together, nestled in the same survival bag. They share food.

For the people of their district, back home, Cato and Clove may be the hope of the Games – Artemisia has no idea how they'll react when one District Two has to kill her District partner. But for Artemisia, it is nightmare. She can't see them together without a heart-thumping beat of fear: something terrible is going to happen.

Something is.

On the day of the Feast, Cato and Clove separate. Cato's gone to find where District Twelve's tributes are hiding; Clove stays near the Cornucopia, staking it out, to catch District Twelve Female unawares.

Clove had District Twelve Female down, and _gloats_. Artemisia thumped the work-station, unable to make her tribute hear. District Twelve Female needs to die. Kill her, and her district partner will die soon enough in their cave. Kill her, and they only have to find two more outlier tributes.

Artemisia understood what was going to happen well before Clove did. District Eleven Male is big, bigger than Cato, and strong. And Clove, who could have killed him quick if she had seen him first, Clove Is wasting her time gloating over the hapless District Twelve Female.

And then Clove is dead.

Heavy rock, wielded by a heavy hand: District Eleven Male busted in Clove's skull, and let District Twelve Female go: some sentimentality about Eleven's district partner, now some days dead.

Clove is dead when her skull caved in. But her body takes some time to die. At last Artemisia's screen has gone dark, and she can stand up, on legs that are cramping because she sat too long.

It doesn't help to know, it really doesn't help, that back in the Training Center the trainers will be using Clove's death as a teaching moment, an example of what mistakes Clove made. She should have killed the District Twelve Female as soon as she had her down. She should have kept watch for District Eleven Male, knowing he might arrive at the Feast at any time.

She should have broken with Cato She should have told them about Cato. Brutus shouldn't have picked Cato.

 _Shoulda, coulda, woulda_ , Artemisia repeats Brutus's dreary mantra to herself, though it doesn't help at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Artemisia and Lyme are stolen from Lorata's wonderful Hunger Games sequence We Must Be Killers. I expect if you're reading this you've read that already and know it, but I just wanted to say: they're not mine but I love them very much.


	10. Part Ten: Coty, District Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she was Reaped, she swore to her little sister that she'd somehow come back to look after them. Her name was never Foxface. She lived to be in the Final Four.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> She lay as one who lies and dreams  
> In a pleasant meadow-land,  
> The watcher watched her as he slept,  
> And could not understand  
> How one could sleep so sweet a sleep  
> With a hangman close at hand?

Not that many children of Reaping age have to take tesserae in District Five, but Manon has taken tesserae for her mother and her sister and brother for three years now: Coty didn't ask, but Manon's father either died or left them four years ago, and they were struggling on only one wage until Manon was old enough to take tesserae.

Manon's sister and brother are Soraya and Gauthier. Soraya is thirteen, Gauthier is eleven. Coty didn't want to know that, but Manon talked compulsively about them over dinner on the tribute train, the first night. By the time Soraya was twelve and old enough to take tesserae herself, Manon had a job in one of the power plants, just a few hours after school, but just enough that the family could get by that and on the tesserae Manon drew every month.

When Coty asked Manon what she'd got, what she was good at, Manon looked shifty. “Acrobatics,” she said. “I was good at gymnastics at school.”

“What are you good at,” Coty asked slowly, “that you don't want your mother to know about?”

“Nothing,” Manon said, so honestly that she must be lying. “I tell my mother everything.”

Coty sat there and looked at Manon. “Maybe you do,” she said, at last. “I didn't, but who knows, maybe you did. What are you good at that you're afraid _someone_ will find out about? Because whoever it is, whatever it is – they don't matter any more. You're a tribute. You'll be in the Arena in a few days. Whatever you did in your past life before you were Reaped, no one will care about it, ever – what matters is what you do in the Arena. What are you good at?”

Manon didn't answer.

“Do you _want_ to survive the Arena? You won't live through it unless you really want to, child.”

“I promised them,” Manon said, at last. She's staring down at her plate, gripping a dessert fork in one hand, as if she can find some answer in the fruit pie with sweetened cream that she ate in several large bites. “ Soraya and Gauthier. I promised them I'd come back. I told Soraya to ask for my job at the power plant, not to take tesserae, and Soraya said I had to come back, and I promised them both I would.”

“What are you good at?” Coty asked, and this time Manon told her.

She's good at stealing, and she's taught her younger sister and brother to steal, too. They are quick, discreet, and clever at it: they can walk out of the big marts with more food than they had money to buy, and Manon is expert at lifting money – not much, just enough – out of the wallets of wealthier citizens.

“You've never been caught?”

“If you're caught you're whipped,” Manon said. “That's never happened to me.”

The Capitol can listen to everything said on a tribute train, and while Manon herself no longer has anything to worry about – if she survives the Arena she'll never need to steal again, and the Peacekeepers will never whip a Victor for thefts committed before she was Reaped – still, her younger brother and sister are her vulnerability. They could be whipped for evidence manufactured or real. But family are always a Victor's vulnerability. Coty has no brothers or sisters, but a mother and uncles she loves, cousins and second cousins: even if they don't get to live in the Victors Village with her, she loves them and takes care of them, as far as she can.

Manon never asked if Coty thinks she'll live.

Coty didn't know what she would say to Manon if she _had_ asked.

But Manon does ask, one night just before the Arena, “Do you think I can kill?” She's been practicing weapons – sensibly, the small, light weapons that take skill to use, but no great strength.

Coty shook her dead. “I don't know. You'll have to find out for yourself.” She's thought about it, and decided that the only two tributes she is sure Manon cannot kill, are the District Ten Female and the District Eleven Female – they're both just about her sister's age. She thought about inviting their mentors to make them Manon's allies, but then that is likely just to make them all three a target - and Manon might not run if she identified them with her sister and wanted to protect them.

“Most people can try to kill when they're fighting for their lives,” Coty said. “The problem is, can you kill someone who's not trying to kill you right then – even if you know it's them or you?”

Manon survived the bloodbath by running away and hiding: Farren's tribute Alois dies fast, at least, shot by the District One Female. So does District Ten Female, removing one problem. District Eleven Female is also trying the hide-and-run strategy, but she's better used to forests than Manon.

Manon spent her three days learning how to use knives and a blowpipe. She showcased her stealth and agility for the Gamemakers, but only scored 5 – the lowest score this year. District Five tributes never win except in city Arenas.

Manon got almost nothing from the Cornucopia before she ran – a small packet of crackers and dried fruit that happened to be close enough to pick up before she fled. No sponsor is interested in a thin and unprepossessing girl from a city District in a forest arena, with the lowest score of all the tributes, even lower than the little girls from Districts Ten and Eleven.

Even after the bloodbath, when sponsors are more interested in any tribute smart and quick enough to survive, no one wants to help Manon. Coty can only watch, therefore, as Manon hid and spied on the other surviving tributes – she's sly and quick. Coty notes that Manon carefully rations the food from the packet – though it is meant to supply a tribute with just one day's calories, Manon takes four days to consume it all. She has nothing to purify water with, and so drinks cautiously only from rainwater pooled on leaves, and from the running stream. That's often safe unless the Gamemakers have outright poisoned the water, and Coty can't help her if they have.

The District Three Male tribute has proved his worth to the Career Pack by moving and re-activating the mines from around the pedestals, to protect their Cornucopia supplies. Now when the Career Pack go hunting, they take the District Three Male with them.

The first interest anyone shows in Manon is when she waits for the Career Pack to leave, and then darts in to the mined pile of supplies.

Coty winced, just watching her: she has fought not to care about Manon, as she fights not to care about any of the tributes she has to mentor who will not come back alive, but she fully expected, watching Manon creep up to the supplies, to see her girl blown to pieces.

But Manon moves between the mines with agility and grace. Carefully, cautiously, Manon proved her claim: she is good at stealing. She takes one of the survival packs, and moves the rest slightly so that unless the Careers actually count them, it won't be obvious one is gone. She fills her pack with bags of dried fruit and dried meat, also slipping them into the pockets of her Arena clothing. She takes a single box of crackers, and some cubes of foil-wrapped cheese from an opened carton. She takes items which the Careers are unlikely to have counted, and she leaves no signs of her thefts behind. Finally, she takes an apple from the netted bag, tucks it into the last space in her bulging pockets, and turns to make the trip back through the mines.

It felt to Coty as if she was holding her breath between Manon's first step and her last out on to safe territory. Once away from the mined ground, Manon ran. She got to the trees and found a fallen log to hide under. Only then did she sink her teeth into the stolen apple.

Only then, did Coty realise that the main narrative had briefly moved on from District Twelve Female, District Eleven Male, Districts Two and One hunting – the interesting tributes – to focus on Manon's careful thievery of the Career's supplies.

The main screen had focussed on Manon stepping inch by careful inch through the mined ground, and on her thin sly hands stealing supplies. Coty breathed out, dumbfounded: for the first time, her inbox was showing sponsor offers. Not big – not enough to buy Manon more food or a blanket – but maybe just enough to get her an empty water bottle or a sheet of waterproof plastic.

The Career Pack have District Twelve's girl trapped up a tree, and it's getting dark and cold. Manon now has a sleeping-bag and a makeshift shelter and food – Coty saw the survival pack had an empty water canteen, and sent Manon the plastic sheet.

Then things get interesting with the Career Pack – two of them die! - and the Twelve-girl, but Manon is still safe and in shelter.

Then District Ten Male was killed, or died – Coty had noticed he was still alive mostly because Lambert was still in the room. When Lambert got up to leave, she did a quick head check and realised that Manon was now in Final Eight.

Back in District Five, Manon's mother and sister and brother will be interviewed, and her workmates and any friends she made at school. Farren appears out of nowhere to replace her: Coty never had a tribute reach Final Eight before, and Farren has to remind her “They'll want to interview you, too.”

Caesar Flickerman is a good interviewer: he put Coty at ease even when she was a scared teenager twenty years ago, and he can still do it now. He didn't make her admit that she had no idea Manon would make it this far.

Manon gets no more sponsors and steals no more supplies: District Twelve Female blows the Career supplies up with a couple of well-placed arrows that drop apples all over the mined ground. District Two Male kills District Three Male. District One Male kills District Eleven Female. District Twelve Female kills District One Male.

Coty looked round the mentors' room, thinking she had never seen it so empty: Haymitch, Chaff, Brutus, Artemisia, and herself. Manon is Final Five now.

She forgot: everyone forgot. Not Final Five, but Final Six. The main narrative loses interest in both Manon and District Eleven Male, and alternates between the District Two pair, playfighting goofily as if they were kids below Reaping age, and the District Twelve pair, who are being sent food and medication, apparently in exchange for kisses. Brutus and Artemisia are clearly bewildered by this: Haymitch looks faintly smug and faintly amused.

Coty can do nothing but watch Manon starve.

The Feast takes her by surprise. What Manon needs, of course, is food.

Manon hides in the Cornucopia overnight, and runs out as soon as the table rises from the green to grab her bag marked 5 and run. The main narrative is still on the Cornucopia, where the bags marked 2, 11, and 12 wait: Coty is hardly aware of altercation, watching Manon drink the hot soup slowly, a mouthful at a time, life coming back to her face.

Tributes die at Feasts, but Manon survived. (District Eleven Male killed District Two Female, but District Twelve Female escaped.) There is just enough food for a day: Manon can stretch it to two.

(District Eleven Male: hiding in the grasslands and swamp. District Two Male: hunting District Eleven male. This doesn't make sense, even Coty knows it doesn't: District Two Male ought to be hunting down all of the weaker tributes first, wiping them out, to allow a final iconic battle between Two and Eleven. But at least, for now, Manon is safe.)

When it starts raining, Manon finds a dry shelter under a tree and huddles there and waits and slowly, slowly, starves. After two days, she has no food left. She can collect rainwater in a pot she stole from the remains of the Career supplies, – it never stops raining, and thunders so loud Coty isn't sure if Manon heard or saw in the sky that District Eleven Male was killed.

But when the rain stopped, Manon goes to find the District Twelve tributes. They are the only people left in the Arena from whom she could steal food.

District Twelve Male is gathering fruit: District Twelve Female is hunting meat with her bow and arrows.

Manon slips out from her hiding place to where District Twelve Male had laid out the fruit he had gathered, and swipes some of it, and some of their sponsor gifts too – she isn't as careful as she was, perhaps not fearing District Twelve as she feared the Careers, perhaps the days of hunger are finally getting to her.

Coty stares down at the almost-blank balance of sponsor funds. Manon is one of the Final Four. Making it to Final Four ought to attract sponsor attention – Manon has proved she can survive.

Without warning, her screen finally goes dark.

Coty stared. Because the main narrative is mostly concerned with District Two Male recovering by the lake in the sun, and District Twelve's lovers doting on each other, it takes her a few minutes to work out what's gone wrong: District Twelve Male picked the wrong berries. By accident, or was he meaning to kill his district partner? He probably wasn't trying to kill Manon: Coty would take her oath that neither of the District Twelves ever noticed Manon watching them.

Manon stole lethal berries, and her theft killed her, and now she's never going home to Soraya and Gauthier and their mother. She'll be buried among the Fallen, on the square of sour city dirt District Five keeps for dead tributes.

Coty didn't know what to do while Manon was still alive, but she understands perfectly the procedure now Manon is dead. She's done it often enough before, and will again. But it takes her some time to stand up and leave her dead screen behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only realised when I was putting this into AO3 that Foxface's chapter ought to have come after Thresh's chapter, but for the story as a whole it feels right to have it here, now.


	11. Part Eleven: Chaff, District Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thresh went down into the sunken meadowland, into the swamp, and almost none of the tributes saw him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We were as men who through a fen  
> Of filthy darkness grope:  
> We did not dare to breathe a prayer,  
> Or give our anguish scope:  
> Something was dead in each of us,  
> And what was dead was Hope.

Thresh can win, if he does as he's told, and Chaff wants him to win – he and Harvest haven't talked about it clearly because neither of them can bear it, but little Rue can't win.

Thresh told Chaff, in private, or as much privacy as anyone can have in the Tribute Tower: Rue and he had talked on the train. They'd agreed to stay away from each other.

(“Rue said she didn't want to have to kill me,” Thresh said. He laughed a little, but the only time Chaff had seen Thresh laugh at all. “Like she meant it.”)

Chaff had a couple of approaches from District Two and District Four about getting his boy Thresh into the Career Pack as an ally, but he'd turned them down, telling Brutus and Sealie that his boy was more of a loner.

From the survival stations, Chaff has figured that this Arena is going to be wilderness with mutts. That puts Thresh at an advantage – he needs to find somewhere he can hide where the other tributes aren't likely to venture because of mutt attacks. This requires Thresh to fight off the mutts himself, but Thresh is happier at the idea of doing that than the idea of going out and killing tributes smaller than him. Which is every tribute in the 74th Games: even Cato and Wattie, the two biggest tributes in the Career Pack, are smaller than Thresh.

(“I'd like to take on that Cato,” Thresh concedes. “He's a bully. He wants to frighten the younger kids.”)

“You're going to need to make a run for the Cornucopia,” Chaff had told him. “And when you do, you're going to need to kill any tributes who get in your way, and not think about whether they're trying to kill you or not. Pick up the nearest weapon, have at them, grab supplies – the best things are always nearest the Cornucopia – and once you've got as much as you can run with, get away. But if you stop to think, you'll die.”)

He watches as Thresh, obedient to Chaff's orders, picks up a machete and lays about him as if he were cutting grass, running through the field of other tributes, direct for the big survival packs in the mouth of the Cornucopia. Career Boy Four goes for Thresh with an axe, but Chaff is as surprised as anyone else when Thresh grabs the axe out of the Career's hand and gives it back to him in his head. Across the room, Tyde grunts, like the breath's jerked out of him.

Some tributes couldn't even lift the big pack, but Thresh picks it up one-handed and swings it on to his back, yanks the axe out of the skull he just shattered, he's still holding his machete in his other hand, and he runs away down the slope away from the Cornucopia, into the low field of long grass.

Chaff glances at Harvest's screen: Rue survived the bloodbath too, but she ran into the pine forest. She won't live, but she's nowhere near Thresh.

He lets himself have a small, private moment of triumph. Thresh may not win - but District Eleven killed a Career in the bloodbath, and only Haymitch could understand how good it feels to know that.

Both Haymitch's tributes are still alive, too. They may yet have a marathon drinking session in front of the big screen watching the end of the Games, but right now. Eleven and Twelve are alive, and one of the Careers is dead.

Thresh stops running only when he's well into the long grass. It's higher than his head: if he crouches down, he can't be seen from the slope above. He settles the big pack on his back, shifting his shoulders: it's heavy, but now a well-balanced load. Machete out and ready, Thresh explores his new domain.

He's careful not to make tracks. There are all sorts of grasses growing in this field, and they'll hide him well. The further in he goes, the higher the grass gets. Through the headphones, Chaff can hear what Thresh hears: the tiny sounds of animal and insect life, the stir of wind in grass.

The boom of the cannons after the bloodbath is startling in the quiet field. Eleven of them. Thresh doesn't look as if he's counting, but he will be. Twelve more kids have to die for Thresh to come home.

There's a patch of swampy ground: Thresh circles it, carefully, leaving only one footprint where he steps on softer mud. A trickle of water, flat and muddy, flows downhill through the field to make a swamp where the long grasses become reeds. Thresh picks a spot of dry ground where anyone coming directly at him from the Cornucopia would plunge into soft swamp, and makes camp.

He has a tent in the pack: a good one. And a sleeping bag. And an empty water canteen and water purification tablets. Not much food, only a little dried meat and some salt, but everyone in District Eleven is experienced in the illegal art of trapping the small animals who come to feast on the crops.

(The Capitol provides swift, palatable poisons for killing vermin that render the flesh inedible. Officially, these are what District Eleven is supposed to use. But even the Peacekeepers turn a blind eye to a bit of unofficial trapping and feasting: after all, the creatures eat the crops, and protecting the crops is important.)

The stream is too shallow for Thresh to drink from, and probably not safe unpurified. He digs a hole with his hands in the mud, lining the sides with small pebbles, and watches it fill up with muddy water. Tomorrow, Chaff knows, the water will look clean: the hole Thresh dug will be a tiny pond, deep enough for him to fill his canteen from. Tonight, Thresh must sleep hungry and thirsty, but alive, and he's proved he can move fast, kill when he has to, and knows how to survive.

(And he's a big handsome young man, Chaff thinks coldly. There will be sponsors who will pay in the expectation of having Thresh himself, if he survives. Chaff lost his hand in the Arena, and found on his first visit to the Capitol that there are fans of the Games who enjoy a maimed Victor.)

The Arena is getting cold with nightfall. Thresh tucks the pack into the tent and slides into his sleeping bag, sealing the door of the tent shut. Though Chaff can't tell him, Thresh is safe enough from the other tributes; he is the only one in the field of long grass, and the Career Pack has gone off to hunt through the woods for Haymitch's girl.

But at nightfall, the field comes alive.

Chaff finds in the sponsor lounge that the few who are interested in Thresh, are laying bets if he'll come out of the tent and be eaten alive, or if the mutts crawling over the tent's fabric can somehow get in.

These mutts are small creatures, about he size of Thresh's hand, with eight clawed legs and a hard carapace. The legs both scuttle and move food toward the mouth, a small wet tentacled opening inside the carapace. The mutts are small, but there are so many of them, and they eat voraciously. There is a camera inside the tent, of course there is: so the District Eleven screen cuts between Thresh's face inside the tent, hearing the sound of the mutts crawling over it, and shots of the mutts eating, falling into that tiny pond Thresh dug and drowning and being eaten by their comrades, eating insects, eating any creature above ground – the birds have all flown from the field at dusk – and crawling over Thresh's tent, not seeming to recognise it as contaning a living creature.

There is one boom of the cannon: the Career pack have found and killed District Eight girl. Thresh hears the cannon fire even inside his tent in the swamp: the sound is made to echo round the Arena. He knows someone has died.

If he has to hide inside his tent each night, he'll never see the Anthem: he'll never know who dies.

That's unacceptable.

Chaff stays in the sponsor lounge, and laughs as if he too thinks it's amusing, and takes the right end of several bets. Thresh stays in his tent until the sun comes up, and all but a few dying mutts disappear, digging down into the soft ground of the swamp and vanishing.

You never know with the Gamemakers: they may appear again every night, or something even worse for tomorrow night. But Thresh had better be under cover before darkness.

Chaff has already figured out what the Gamemakers intend for Thresh, especially since he killed Career Boy Four in the bloodbath: he is to be the champion against the sole survivor from the Career pack. This will work especially well for a standard Games story if the Careers survivor is Career Girl Four: . If there's any chance that Thresh can slip into the camp while the Careers are asleep – he's big but he's quiet – and cut the remaining Career Four's throat and then disappear again, that would be best.

But Thresh might not.

He's a fighter: he's been in and out of trouble most of his life, mostly with Peacekeepers and guards, walking on the edge of law and order. He's never been whipped: that says he has enough self-control to back down when authority might make it a whipping matter, and also says that he's enough of a good worker that they don't want to put him out of action if they don't have to. But he has, he told Chaff, been knocked down and beaten a few times by guards to make him show respect. That happened to Chaff, too – it happened to Harvest, though that's not his story to share.

What Thresh is not, is the sort of kid who could kill in cold blood some girl smaller than him, especially not in her sleep.

With care, Thresh has established that the crawling mutts who invade nightly are edible.

(Thresh finds out the slow way: he rubs the flesh inside the carapace on his skin, waits, rubs the flesh on his lips, waits, tries a small taste, waits, tries a small bite, waits: he checks each step again when he has found enough dry wood to light a nearly-smokeless fire far from his encampment to cook them.)

While Thresh is waiting between trials of the white crab-mutts, and fortunately when he is facing towards the swamp, he sees a green waving thing, like an arm, like two arms - small enough to be a child's arms - pushing itself up out of the swampy ground.

It's another mutt: rabbit-sized, bullet-shaped, with four legs all shaped like arms with elbows not knees, and claws. Long, sharp, emerald claws. Once it's all the way out from the swamp earth, it comes running on its hands, very fast. Thresh sits still, watching it. His only move is to pick up the axe.

The green thing is almost at Thresh, its circular mouth open, showing all its emerald teeth, when Thresh launches himself sideways and throws the axe. It hits the creature with a hard sound in the middle of its body, and the bullet-shell cracks open, and the creature falls over. It's still crawling towards Thresh, but the lethal speed is gone, because its green, sloppy innards are stretching out between its front half and its back. Thresh picks up the machete, takes two steps, and slices the thing in half.

The mutt gushes green - might as well call it blood. Green blood. Thick and sticky and poisonous-looking. Thresh doesn't touch it. He retrieves his axe, and - keeping a very wary eye on the swamp - finds a dry place to clean the blades with earth.

Then he comes back to his tent, sits down where he can see the swampy ground where the green thing appeared, and goes back to carefully trialling the white crab-mutts as a food source.

(Chaff found out the fast way: he looked the white crab-mutts up in the database about the Arena that has been made available to mentors, and discovered they were a variant on land-crabs, and the flesh inside the carapace is very nearly pure protein and very edible.)

On the screen, District Eleven Male's sponsor funds are shooting up.

Chaff sends Thresh a pack of cloths and a spray to clean his axe and machete, and a hand-grinder to keep them sharp. He can already see what the green blood is doing to the ground. He feels rich, being able to do this - like a bloody Career - but the crab-mutts have virtually solved Thresh's food problem. All sponsors like a tribute who isn't dependent on gifts of food, and there's a large subset of sponsors who love to watch tributes kill mutts - or get killed by them. Chaff has no illusions that the sponsors paying to keep Thresh's equipment in good condition because they like to see a tribute fight, wouldn't love just as much to see Thresh lose the fight and be eaten alive.

That night, and every night after, Thresh digs ditches, the mutts fall into them in the night, break their fragile legs, and can't dig their way to safety once daylight sends the others burrowing underground. Thresh is eating well. He makes string out of grass in the long cold nights in his tent, and he uses scraps of crab-mutt to bait traps for the birds that descend into the swamp during the day.

On the next day, the mutt that climbs out of the swamp is a bit larger, bright blue, and has six limbs - four on which it runs, and two mouth-limbs for grabbing. A blow with the axe slows it, but it still grabs on to Thresh's leg, its long sapphire claws penetrating the tough fabric. Thresh grunts with pain, but he doesn't panic: he levers the mutt off with the machete, and then stabs it through the mouth, pinning it to the ground. That doesn't kill it: it's shaking its head, reaching round with the mouth-limbs to try and pull it out, but Thresh cuts off each of the four running limbs with four blows of the axe, and then hacks at the mouth limbs, two blows each, before yanking his machete out and standing poised to run.

But it can't move. It takes a long time to die, but with all six limbs more or less detached from its body, it can't go anywhere.

Thresh sits down a distance from it, and watches it die, weapons cautiously to hand, but making bird-snares from the grass-woven string. Chaff sends a pot of healing ointment: Thresh uses it on the claw-wound in his leg.

The birds are mostly strong enough to break the grass string. Chaff figures Thresh has enough food with the crab mutts.

The next day, the Gamemakers send a forest fire to chase Haymitch's girl back to the Career pack. The main narrative turns to her outrunning the fire and the pack finding her: Chaff doesn't mind. Thresh has proved over two days that he can carry a good part of the Games narrative by himself, surviving and killing mutts in the swamp. Chaff wonders if Thresh can smell the fire: it's never visible from the swamp.

As if to mix things up, the dark blue spider-mutt doesn't crawl out of the bit of swampy ground Thresh has been watching. It appears from somewhere else: it spins webbing. Thresh has to do a good bit of ducking and running to escape the web: he kills the spider-mutt with fire. It's the first time he's risked making a fire in the Swamp that could be seen from outside it: he must be able to smell the Games-makers forest fire and figure that this is not likely to be noticed.

Before the spider-thing attacked Thresh, it had woven a cocoon of eggs. The Gamemakers showed that briefly on the main narrative screen: if Chaff hadn't been watching intently, he wouldn't have known.

He sends Thresh a box of eggs. In District Eleven, eggs are a luxury treat: in the Games, four raw grosling eggs cost a lot considered as food, but are worth it for a warning.

Thresh buries the eggs carefully in the ashes of the fire, just as if he thought they were just food, and then sets off in the direction the spider came from, tracking the webbing. He finds the cocoon - it's not even hidden, but unless Thresh had tracked the spider, he might never have noticed it until the eggs all hatched and hundreds of dark blue spider things came crawling out to eat Thresh alive.

Thresh builds a fire around the cocoon with light dry grass, and sets it alight, then moves backward, far enough to be able to see it burn.

It burns well.

Thresh feasts on roasted egg in his tent that night. There have still been no further deaths.

District Five girl is hiding near the Career Pack. District Ten boy has gone to ground somewhere a way off from the main action and isn't doing anything interesting. The Career Pack has Haymitch's girl treed. (The Career Pack this year includes Haymitch's boy, which Chaff doesn't see as a long-term survival strategy, not that he'd ever tell Haymitch that: you do what you can: he doesn't want to think about Rue.)

The next day, Thresh is harvesting the dried webbing - Chaff's watching as Thresh discovers the webbing makes better snares than the twisted grass - and all but stumbles across the purple puddle on the ground. It's not moving, but when he throws a bit of crab meat at it, it moves to engulf the food.

Just then, the cannon booms. Thresh startles, glances up, drops a bit of crab meat at his feet.

There is no way to tell Thresh it's not Rue: Haymitch's girl knocked a trackerjacker nest out of the tree into the Career Pack, and while she's not being credited with the kill, Career Girl One is dead from it.

Not long after, Career Girl Four collapses near the lake and dies too: a second cannon boom, and Thresh startles again - then jumps back. The purple thing had reached his boots and was sucking at them.

(Chaff checks: he can afford to buy Thresh new boots, if he has to.)

Thresh makes the purple thing flow after him by throwing scraps of crab-mutt meat ahead of it: he keeps going, sideways up the slope towards the Cornucopia, not letting the purple thing make a track in the grass. Chaff sees what he's doing and grins with delight: viewing figures, focussed on the Career Pack tribulations and Haymitch's girl writhing in agony over trackerjackers (oh, and Career Boy Two stabbed Haymitch's boy for going back to help: well, that figured) - viewing figures were flowing back to Thresh.

The Capitol wanted to see what Thresh would do with the mutt he was feeding to follow him. This in the middle of the drama over the trackerjackers.

What Thresh did, when he got to the top of the slope, unobserved by the surviving Careers who are screaming and thrashing in the lake, splashing water over themselves to drive away the trackerjackers, was literally throw himself sideways, a jump that left untouched high grass between himself and the purple thing: and then, crouched by the grass, still unobserved by the Career Pack, go on throwing bits of crab-mutt meat as far out into the Cornucopia plain as he could.

The purple puddle oozed after the bits of meat. It left a faint trail of quickly-drying slime behind. When it had oozed all of the way out on to the plain, Thresh threw a last bit of crab-mutt meat high and far, and then turned and scuttled for cover.

The purple thing lay like a flattish, puffy puddle on the dry ground. It oozed and twitched, this way and that, but once Thresh was no longer throwing scraps of meat, it seemed to have not a clue where to go.

The sponsors sent enough funds that Chaff could send Thresh replacement boots, better than the ones he'd lost. But Thresh still had to hide inside his shelter that night from the white crab-mutts; he still didn't know who'd died.

The purple thing was still lying there the next day - Chaff checked: and it was probably stil alive, whatever "alive" meant for a puddle of purple glop. He could only hope one of the Careers would take a stroll in the dark.

Chaff and Haymitch and Isabel were all used to seeing their tributes die in the bloodbath and having nothing to do til the end of the Games. Chaff had seen more tributes survive the bloodbath than Isabel, and either of them more than Haymitch, but District Ten, District Eleven, and District Twelve were all far outside the Capitol's interest: Chaff had seen three Eleventh District winners since the 45th Hunger Games, Isabel had mentored one other Tenth District winner since the 48th, and Haymitch was still the only living Twelfth District winner since the 50th.

Thresh walked through the swampland and meadows methodically, patrolling to find the day's mutt; he seemed to have figured out that one at least would be sent to kill him or be killed each day. That worried Chaff: the Gamemakers didn't like it if tributes seemed to be taking the Arena for granted. Thresh was popular with enough Capitol fans that they wouldn't risk killing Thresh off arbitrarily: but it was likely that tomorrow's mutt would be something different, something to take Thresh by surprise.

And as he went, he set bird snares.

The huge red snake pouring along the ground is big enough to swallow Thresh whole, and its skin looks thick and scaly: even its eyes are protected by clear thick scales. Thresh sees it, stands as if frozen with fear for long enough for the snake to slither five yards closer, and then he turns and runs.

Thresh isn't running in a panic, Chaff understands after the first long moment of surprise: he knows the ground well after six days, and Thresh is running fast through soft parts of the swamp where his feet sink an inch or so with every step: and he's running toward the small grove of stunted trees near the middle of the swamp. He's chosen this ground - neither water nor earth - to slow the snake down - it can still get along, but it isn't moving as fast as it was where the ground was dry and hard.

Thresh reaches the trees, and Chaff wonders for a moment if he means to climb them, but instead he hits the biggest branch of the nearest tree twice with his axe, and bending it with his weight: it snaps off after those two blows, and the snake has not yet quite reached the grove.

Thresh chops fast and methodically: he's cut wood before. That's not allowed, except under orders, in District Eleven: but the snake has reached the clearing and Thresh picks up the branch and slams it down just where the scarlet hood meets the crimson body, and grinds the twin down-pointing branches hard into the earth.

The snake is pinned. It will have the branch that pins it down out of the ground in a few minutes, the way it writhes, but for those few minutes it is completely defenceless, and Thresh has his axe and he's chopping at the snake as if it were wood.

When it dies, Chaff realised he'd been holding on to the edge of his console as if he were a new mentor watching his tribute have his first fight. He's embarrassed, but no one is watching him, not even Harvest: she's gone to try and shake down the pupil sponsors one more time. Haymitch isn't in the room either: he must have left to have a nap while his tributes are unconscious.

The great crimson snake is dead. Thresh is on his knees, breathing hard; he's never looked so exhausted after a fight. The viewing figures are high, but that's only because no one else in the Arena is doing anything interesting. Everyone except Rue is hiding or recovering from trackerjacker stings. Sponsors aren't much interested.

Thresh picks himself up, goes back to his camp, drinks some water from his canteen, and treats himself to some of the dried fruit he's kept from the original supplies. He walks on round his territory again, collecting three live birds from his snares. He walks slowly, looking very tired, but he re-sets his bird snares and then, before he goes to sleep, he pegs the three birds out on the slppe leading up to the Cornucopia, each the same height up the slope, counting his paces (his lips move when he uses numbers: Chaff is the same way).

When the crabs come, they eat the birds alive. The sponsors in the lounge are a bit bored. They like how Thresh has been keeping himself, they were impressed by his fight against the crimson snake, but by this time, it's clear from how they talk about him, that for Thresh to fight mutts and win is just what they expect.

The next day, Thresh is eating his morning meal of white crab, when a small, yellow bear pops up. It looks like a toy: rounded body, fluffy fur, big black eyes. It appears to be shy, perhaps scared, curling up into a little yellow fluffy ball with a squeaky sound of alarm when Thresh stands up.

Chaff is very frightened. Thresh is smiling. He holds out a piece of mutt-meat in his hand, and throws it, to land near the yellow ball of scared bear-fluff. The bear unrolls, makes a happy noise, and lands nose first in the mutt meat, which it devours.  
  
Still smiling, Thresh turns, eyeing the long grass around his camp. Small movements. Small squeaky noises. The grass is alive with these little yellow bears, and they are all moving towards Thresh.

They'll eat him alive, Chaff knows, and he'll have to watch. Why is Thresh still smiing?

Thresh runs. No part of the grass is free of the yellow bears, but Thresh slams his boot down hard on the first one he encounters - it dies with a sad, helpless little groan - and Thresh goes on running. He's heading for the lake. He's not running hard, this time: he doesn't have to. He can move faster than the yellow bears.

Thresh glances over his shoulder. He's no longer smiling. His face looks as sullen-stupid as ever. He's pulling all of the yellow bears after him at once, they're all scrambling over the soft ground to go after him, they're keyed to him, Chaff sees what Thresh plans, but what if the yellow bears can swim?

They can't, it turns out.

Thresh plunges into the water. He's taking a risk, if the Gamemakers have planted a water-mutt to kill him, but he goes no further than thigh deep, and although by the end the yellow bears are crawling over the drowned bodies of those who went before them, they can't reach Thresh without going out of their depth, and they drown.

It takes a long time. Thresh plunges out of the lake again, now bobbing-yellow with the slimy-fluff bodies, and finds that the yellow bears devoured all of his crab meat and two of the birds he snared. Two more were far enough away that the bears didn't smell them.

Thresh doesn't eat that day. Chaff doesn't send him food. (He thinks about it, but he has never sent Thresh food just for a meal, and he thinks it better if his boy doesn't have that expectation. Any District Eleven child learns how to work hard on a day's hunger.)

Thresh pegs the live birds out methodically, both further up the slope towards the Cornucopia plain than he went yesterday. He's counting his paces, making sure of it. He re-sets his snares again that night, and goes to sleep.

The next morning, he's woken early by a single cannon.

That's District Ten's boy, eaten some poison berries. Rue is still alive: she and Haymitch's girl have formed an alliance. Thresh opens his eyes to the cannon and stares up at the tent's ceiling.

Both of the birds were eaten alive by the crab-mutts where Thresh pegged them out. Thresh is walking slowly down the slope back towards his camp, when a big wolf-shaped animal with green-tipped fur and paws like hands comes plunging out of the grass and goes for him.

It's a straight fight, Thresh against the green-wolf, and Thresh wins: but there are four more of the wolves with hands, and one by one they scream like human children when Thresh stabs them. One of them is worrying at the fastening of his tent when Thresh stabs her through the back.

This time, at least, Thresh gets to eat his fill of the white crab-mutts. He's keeping a wary eye out as he eats: Chaff wishes there was a way to let him know the pack was five and Thresh got all five and that Rue is still alive.

The sponsors liked it. Thresh is alive. That's all that matters.

On the main narrative screen, Haymitch's girl is studying the Career supply dump. She raises her bow, and fires.

Thresh leaps to his feet, spitting out a mouthful of crab, and stares around him.

The noise even down in the bottomlands is incredible. Thresh is standing, staring around him, looking for something that made such a noise.

He collects the snared birds - four of them - and plants them nearer the top of the slope than he'd gone yet. Then he crawls up and peers out cautiously: but they don't see him. For a moment, the same scene is on almost everyone's screens except Harvest's: Rue is far away in the woods.

The Career pack looking at their destroyed supply of food. They have nothing left except what they had with them when they left on the day's hunt, and a few sleeping bags rolled up near the Cornucopia. In the woods, Haymitch's girl, watching them. In the long grass, his Thresh, watching them. (Haymitch's boy's screen shows nothing except the sky and the reeds: he's hiding by the stream, dying by inches.)

Career Boy Two kills the District Three boy who was with the Pack: a cannon fires. After the sound of the explosions, the noise of the cannon seems anti-climactic.

Before dark, before the anthem, before the crab-mutts come, Thresh slips back down through the long grass and shelters in his tent. The Career Pack slips away into the woods, One alone and Two together. The Career Pack is done, now. Chaff sees it. He wishes Thresh could know.

Chaff wanted to believe that the winner was going to be his Thresh, and also that Thresh wouldn't have to kill Haymitch's girl.

But he could see the narrative clear enough, and even welcomed it; the Gamemakers would let mutts kill Thresh if he was careless, but so long as Thresh kept finding ingeniously interesting ways to kill mutts for the cameras, the Gamemakers will wait to drive him out of the swamp til the day when Thresh is the last but one.

If that one is District Two or District One Males, they'll die. Thresh is bigger than them and stronger than them, and as the weeks go by, he's eating better than them - a big meal of crab mutt in the morning, a hard day's exercise exploring the field and fighting today's mutt, and then in the evening, eating groosling or turkey. There are also patches of edible grains, and Thresh knows how to use them for food even without a fire.

But if that one is District Twelve Female, Haymitch's girl, if she still has arrows left for her bow, then she might kill Thresh before he ever reaches her. This is why distance-weapons are rarely allowed in the Games.

Chaff looks up the cost of body-armor, surreptitiously - he doesn't want Haymitch to notice, and that is a bizarre feeling after all of these years of the three of them watching the Games on the big screen on Floor Ten or Eleven or Twelve of the Tribute Tower, discussing strategies and cheering when Career tributes get killed or groaning when outlier tributes make lethal mistakes.

It doesn't matter. The body-armor he'd need for Thresh, strong enough to turn an arrow, light enough that Thresh could run fast while wearing it, loose enough Thresh could move and fight in it, that's so far beyond what he could afford to buy for Thresh that probably District Two couldn't afford it either, even if they were looking: District Two gives their tributes a weapon when they reach the Final Four, not armor.

Thresh's breakfast of crab mutt the next morning is interrupted by a huge grey creature, body and four running limbs like a horse, head shaped like a human torso and a man's face, two grasping limbs like human arms, and a seventh feeding limb that descends from between its foreparts: the end of the feeding limb is a big-toothed mouth that munches on plants.

It can eat and fight at the same time: it's fast and intelligent, and armed with homemade spears. When Thresh stabs the human torso through with his machete, the thing goes on moving, blindly, with the dead human torso bouncing floppily like a bloody doll. (In the middle of the fight, the cannons fire, twice: Thresh seems barely to notice.) But once the thing's head is dangling from the damaged torso, too blinded by trickling blood to see, Thresh moves in carefully and smashes the thick equine legs with the back of his axe, one by one by one by one: it falls, collapses, lands on its side, and still takes a while, half-kicking its broken limbs, to die.

Thresh looks at it for a long time, even after the thing is dead. Finally, he turns away, and plods up the slope towards the pegged-out birds.

One of the cannons is for Rue: Chaff looks away, giving his district partner the courtesy of privacy. He can see she's weeping, silently, though she knew (he knew) (Thresh knew) (was there anyone but Rue who didn't know) that Rue never stood a chance.

The other is for Career Boy One. Malachite mutters something to himself, stands up, and leaves.

This time, both birds are alive. Dying from tugging at the tether, feathers broken, legs messed up: but the crab-mutts never reached them. Thresh wrings their necks. Then he goes back to his camp, and packs. He fills his canteen with water. He takes his weapons, and the sleeping bag, rolled up tight and fitted into a pocket.

Chaff wonders if Thresh can possibly suppose he is now in Final Four and plans to go hunting. But well below the top of the ridge, just where he pegged out the birds that survived, Thresh stops, and sits down in the grass. He has his bottle of water with him. and tucked into one of his pockets, the sleeping-bag that folds down to a tiny roll of fabric.

Chaff wishes Thresh had thought of doing this any other night. Tonight Thresh will be able to watch the anthem and the Fallen.

Thresh makes himself a bed of pulled grass, lays the sleeping bag out on it. and slides under, his entire body sheltered and warm, only his face looking out at the sky, his machete to hand in case he's attacked in the night.

District One Male's face appears in the sky.

Rue's face appears in the sky.

Thresh's face crumples. He waits: but Rue's face is the last. Thresh buries hmself in the sleeping-bag and weeps: harsh sobs shaking him. It's the first sign of weakness he's ever shown, and the sponsors don't like it.

Chaff drinks his coffee and thinks hard thoughts. Rue didn't stand a chance, he tells himself. Not a chance. Thresh still does. Thresh is in the Final Six now.

The next morning Thresh awakes to the first light. His face is quietly controlled now.

The only Careers left are both the Twos. Brutus and Artemisia sit side by side across the room from Chaff. They both take the Games seriously: they train vicious Careers, Chaff knows, but they're quiet companions in the mentors' room. One of Chaff's tributes killed one of Brutus's tributes, once, and with luck that's what will happen again this Games, but Brutus will never bear a grudge.

There are no monsters for Thresh to kill that day. He searches the meadowland and the swamp for them, he circles the lake, but he the Gamemakers have sent nothing. No cannons fire. Thresh lies down in his tent to sleep that night.

The voice from the sky sounds the same to all the surviving tributes: the main narrative screen flashes from one to the next, to all six of the survivors, even Haymitch's boy, who's surely not that far off death:

The Gamemakers have changed the rules. Two tributes from the same District can be victors together as district partners.

Two victors. Not one. But Rue is dead.

Thresh turns his face into the privacy of his sleeping bag, and doesn't make a sound.

The next day, it seems to be back to the usual for Thresh's Games: a white beast like the grey one, but with a horse's head instead of a human torso, only four limbs instead of seven, but a long lethal horn on its head to stab with. Its eyes glow blue. It has sharp teeth.

Thresh leads it through the swamp and traps it in soft ground, and uses his machete to hack at its neck til it's mostly severed from its body.

There are no cannons, but Thresh slips up through the grass - he's taking a different route each time, not leaving a track - and lies where he can watch the Cornucopia.

The purple puddle is still there, though by now it may be dead: Thresh doesn't do more than glance at it. His eyes are on the Career Two district partners, cavorting together on the grass by the lake. They're wrestling, but it's clear it's play-fighting even from a distance: they're both laughing.

Thresh grits his teeth and slips away again to check his bird-snares. He wrings one by the neck and leaves it hanging up by a tree: one he carries alive, holding it by its body and beak so it can't make a noise, back up the slope again.

Chaff knows he shouldn't approve. Thresh's best chance is to be the one who survives til the end, to fight Career Boy Two (Brutus won't hold a grudge) or somehow to kill Haymitch's girl. He should stay out of the way in the sunken land, fighting and killing mutts. But damn, he likes this. And the sponsors will too. Thresh reaches the top of the slope - the Career Twos are paying no attention: Thresh could have got one of them if he attacked now, but the other would get Thresh, for sure - and then he breaks the bird's wings so it can't fly away, and throws it, a living, flapping weight, to land on the purple puddle sunken into the ground.

Thresh doesn't stay to watch. He slips away, not leaving a track. But the purple thing is alive, and the bird is screaming as it's engulfed.

That draws the Career Twos over. By the time they get there, having grabbed up their weapons, the bird is eaten, and the purple puddle is quiet again, just a few feathers sitting on the surface: at first they don't see it, and then it begins to ooze towards them.

There are two of them, and they understand hunting, and know how to kill. But the only thing they have to bait it with is each other. It's a long tricky night for the Careers, which Chaff watches with silent enjoyment, as they eventually manage to kill it - or at least burn it so much it stops moving - with a succession of badly-made torches . He hopes to be able to tell Thresh about that night later.

Nothing changes the next day, The mutts that surface from the lake are big black birds with long wings and long necks and red beaks: they spit poison and the beaks are toothed. Their wings break easily: Thresh breaks their wings and slashes through their necks, and gets only one spit of poison on bare skin. He washes it off: it leaves a raised red welt. Chaff sends a pot of medicated ointment. The sponsors still like Thresh, even though he cried over Rue.

Haymitch's girl has rescued Haymitch's boy, and Haymitch's boy is dying.

Chaff thinks the final fight will be between Career Boy Two and Thresh, and he thinks Thresh will win: sure, Career Two's been training half his life to fight in the Arena, but Thresh has been fighting for his life every day in the Arena and he's won every time.

Towards the end, many Games have a Feast, and most Feasts end in death: Chaff's warned Thresh he needs to go, if a Feast is offered, because not doing so is also usually a way of dying. If the Gamesmakers want to give you something, you need to go.

No cannons. No deaths. Thresh sleeps in his tent, and eats a light breakfast, and heads up the slope. He's having to move carefully now not to leave a trail. He doesn't take either axe or machete onto the plain with him: he leaves them where he slept the night he saw Rue's face in the sky. If anyone sees him, they won't know what weapons he has.

Early though he is, the District Five girl has been and gone: and Haymitch's girl is fighting with Career Two girl, and losing.

Thresh could take his gift easily while they're fighting, and run with it.

Career Two girl has Haymitch's girl down, knives out, about to carve her up alive. She's laughing, the Career, laughing and bragging about killing -

About killing Rue.

And just like that, Thresh is on her. His voice is brutal with rage. He slams her in the head with a rock he picked up, and caves her skull in: Chaff can hear it go, like an egg crunching. No cannon: but Career Two girl is as good as dead.

Haymitch's girl is down and helpless. She tells Thresh she was Rue's partner, her friend -

And Thresh lets her go.

Chaff glances over at Haymitch. As all through these strange Games, Haymitch resolutely doesn't look back at him.

Thresh grabs up the bag labelled Two and the bag labelled Eleven - they're the same size - and runs.

Both the packs contain the same thing: body armor. A full suit of protection, the kind Chaff looked at and dismissed as too expensive, covering Thresh from heel to head, all but his hands and face. Thresh puts it on.

He dumps the other bag in his tent. He stands to watch the anthem, and the faces in the sky. There are no crab-mutts tonight. The girl Thresh killed appears.

And it starts to rain.

Chaff sees, but has no way to tell Thresh, that after howling over the dead body of his district partner, the Career Two boy entered the marshland. He's hunting Thresh.

It's too early in the Games, with three other tributes still alive, and the Gamemakers know it: it rains hard. Thresh has to leave his tent because of flooding: he and the Career Two boy are wandering the swamp together, Thresh's advantage of knowing the ground gradually being eroded with the flooding water from the sky, but the Career Two boy clearly having no idea where he is going, only one thought in his mind: to kill the tribute who killed his district partner.

Once Career Two boy is dead, Thresh will have to find and kill the District Five girl, and Chaff doesn't know if he can: and then there are both of Haymitch's kids, because the Feast for Twelve was a Capitol potion that would even cure near-fatal blood poisoning.

The next day dawns, hardly visible through the rain. No mutts appear. It's still Career Two boy and Thresh stumbling round in the swamp ground, neither one able to find the other, hidden by the blinding rain and thunder. When night falls, Thresh looks as if he's hoping for crab mutts - they couldn't get at Thresh through the body armor, which is at least keeping him warm and dry, while Career Two boy is getting wetter and colder every hour - but Chaff knows too well that the Gamemakers won't solve the problem that way. Either Career Two boy gives up and goes to find and kill the other tributes, or Thresh has to find him and kill him.

They stumble across each other in the grove of trees where Thresh killed the red snake. There's no sign of it left now, not even a dribble of scarlet, only the wounded tree to show a battle was fought and won.

Thresh is good at fighting.

But, Chaff realises with a slow sinking of the heart, Career Two boy is better.

The only thing that saves Thresh from being wounded in the fight is the body armor: and the body armor doesn't protect him against Career Two's body blows, aimed - once Two realised Thresh was armored - at Thresh's stomach and chest, to hurt his wind and break his ribs with the force of the blows. And though Thresh is big and quick, Career Two is almost as big, and quicker. Thresh lands a few blows with his machete, but he's dropped the axe and he's scratched Career Two's hide, not delivered a killing blow.

They're fighting in rain and mud and thunder, and Thresh still isn't wounded - though he's gasping for breath - when Career Two kicks him hard and Thresh falls on his face, not even recovering with his arms, his hands sliding out in front of him in the mud.

Like lightning, Career Two grabs up the fallen axe, and slams it down, on Thresh's right wrist, then on his left.

Chaff watches, because it's all he can do, as Thresh bleeds to death, in the mud, in the rain.

  



	12. Part Twelve: Brutus, District Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brutus knows the odds. He pulled two Victors: he hasn't given up hope for three. But he knows, every time he sits down in the mentor's seat: his kid has only one chance in six to make it home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And in it lies a wretched man  
> Eaten by teeth of flame,  
> In burning winding-sheet he lies,  
> And his grave has got no name.

Brutus knows the odds. He pulled two Victors: he hasn't given up hope for three. But he knows, every time he sits down in the mentor's seat: his kid has only one chance in six to make it home.

He could have sworn no kid of his, no tribute, could get a lie past him: and maybe Cato wasn't lying then, when he looked Brutus in the eye and told him square, if it's just the two of us left, I can kill her.

Brutus is loyal to the Capitol: the Capitol will not cheat its Victors. But he also knows the Gamesmakers, and the Gamesmakers will cheat a tribute. The Gamesmakers are not the Capitol.

The promised rule change is a lie.

The very best he can hope for Cato, for his boy, is that his boy is fast enough to kill Artemisia's girl, if the two of them survive to the end. Artemisia is Two, she'll understand. It feels strange and awful to watch the two of them killing a liquid purple blob of glup together on the Cornucopia plateau, Artemisia in the mentor chair next to his, and knowing that just as he is hoping for her girl to slip, to die, so is she hoping for his boy to make some lethal mistake.

Shouldn't be like that for District Two. They're district partners, they work together til the Pack splits and then they steer clear of each other and fight other districts, not each other.

Cato should have made sure to kill the District Twelve Male, not left him alive with a lethal wound. Sure, who'd have thought District Twelve could afford to buy that kind of Capitol potion-making, but this has been a strange, bad games. If District Twelve Male was dead, if District Twelve Female didn't have a district partner, would the Capitol even have made that rule change?

District Twelve Female is good with that bow.

Brutus can't give Cato body armor. District Two doesn't give its winning tribute armor, they give a weapon: Cato will get a sword.

(He looks up the price of body armor anyway: it would wipe them out. But worth it, if Cato won. Sponsor money is always there for Twos - it's only restricted by what the Gamesmakers will let them spend it on.)

Someday, when they're both very drunk, Lyme is going to ask Brutus again why he picked Cato.

Artemisia isn't going to ask: she's a good kid, and shows respect to her seniors. Mostly.

Brutus picked Cato out by eye three years ago, when the kid had his first kill-human test.

Cato walked into the room, fifteen, already a big kid, tall as the woman he was to kill, and the woman said nothing but launched herself at him. The woman had been told - all of the crims are told - if they can kill the kid that's been sent to execute them, they can go free.

Cato's fifteen and a thirty-year-old woman who killed her husband for raping her daughter is at his throat, her big hands struggling to close round his neck. She'd wept when she was shut in the room, cried that she wanted to go home to her daughter, but Brutus saw her attack Cato and she wasn't weeping then: she was out to kill him.

Cato broke her arms before he kicked her in the throat and she choked to death on her own blood. He's brutal, effective, and quick.

(The woman's daughter is eight and in the Program. With both her parents dead she goes to a children's home. Brutus takes note of her name: if she fights like her mother, if she makes it through the Program all the way to the end, he'd maybe like to mentor her for the 81st Hunger Games.)

Brutus didn't say anything then. Brutus respects trainers, but he couldn't be one: their job is to take ordinary kids from Two and turn them into potential Victors. A kid who breaks and can't get back, can't be a Victor. Trainers need to find a kid's breaking points and shatter them.

For a lot of kids, the kill-human test is their breaking point. Wasn't for Brutus. Wasn't for Cato.

Cato killed a woman barehanded, a man with a knife that Cato had to fight him for, and another man with the sticks and stones scattered over the wooded grounds they fight in. They make him go through all three because he never cries.

Brutus never cried either.

He watches Cato, back then. He doesn't speak to him: Victors and trainees don't mix. Brutus respects the judgement of the trainers, and if they'd ruled Cato wouldn't survive the Arena, couldn't be a Victor, he'd have stood back and let someone else pick out District Two's male Volunteer that year. Brutus doesn't have anything to prove: he mentors every year he can. But it wouldn't have felt right going into the 74th Hunger Games with anyone else but Cato, after three years of watching him. Cato's ready for the Arena before he gets there.

Except for this.

Cato loves Clove.

And if Brutus had known that, Clove would never have been chosen as Volunteer. Not even if Artemisia didn't speak to him all year.

By the time Clove gets her head bashed in by a rock, Brutus can see two ways this Games is going to end. Not who wins: he wants that to be his kid, but he knows better than to count on that tll the trumpets sound. But the ending. Cato's going to fight District Eleven Male, or Cato's going to fight District Twelve Female.

One or the other.

And Brutus wants it to be the District 11 kid. He's watched - whenever his time permitted - Chaff's boy fight mutts in the swampland below the Cornucopia. It's like District Eleven this time's been given his own minature Arena to prove himself in, and damn, he's good. This ain't going to be no swift kill: Cato's going to prove he's a Victor against a kid who can hold his own against some crazy damned mutts. District Eleven fights fast and fights smart and fights clean.

District Twelve has her knack with a bow. And that's about it. She's spent her Games mostly hiding and running. She's made one clean kill, District One Male. She didn't give a damn about her district partner til the Gamemakers announced the rule change, and then all her fancy talk didn't exactly hide that her loving him was the biggest damn fake Brutus had ever seen, and that included twenty-five years of Caesar Flickerman's hair.

Brutus wants the District Twelve boy dead. Cato shoulda made it a clean kill. Then he wants the District Five thief dead. Then he wants the District Twelve girl to kill Clove. She'll make it fast and he doesn't want Cato to have to do it. Then he wants Cato to kill the District Twelve girl. And take his time. And finally he wants his boy to kill District Eleven Male, and the trumpets to sound, and hey, roses and peaches and a pony while he's asking.

Brutus wasn't reaped yesterday. He knows you don't get what you want in this world.

He can't even look at Artemisia as she gets up from her chair, her screen gone dark. Clove got stupid.

It's not Brutus's place to say so.

Cato missed District Twelve and District Five in the forest on their way to the Feast. He could have caught up with one of them as they left the Feast, but Clove is on the ground dying and Cato goes down on his knees beside her, and he howls like Brutus never heard a kid from Two howl.

Like the Arena found his breaking point.

Clove is dying. Cato loves Clove, and Clove is dying, and Brutus knows a thousand ways to send a hundred different messages to a tribute in the Arena, but none of them let him tell Cato what he's thinking, right now:

_I'm sorry your girl's dead. You don't have time now. Get up and go hunting. Kill the Twelve girl before she gets back to their hideout and then the Twelve boy dies. Find the Five girl and kill her. You're nearly home, my boy: just get up and fight._

Cato isn't crying. Tearlessly, on his knees by Clove's body, Cato strips Clove of all her weapons, every knife and dart. He takes Clove's small pack with what was left of her food supplies. He picks himself up, and doesn't look back when the hovercraft comes to collect Clove's body.

And then, as if he'd forgotten everything he'd ever learned in the Training Center about the best order of kills in the Arena, Cato marches down into the unknown swampland, and goes after District Eleven.

Brutus isn't surprised when the Gamemakers promptly set off the rain - drenching, bucketing, flooding rain. It's meant to make Cato turn back, but Brutus is also not surprised when Cato doesn't.

For two days, Cato tracks District Eleven through the swampland in the rain to finish him off. When it happens, the fight is all Brutus could have asked for, if he were allowed to ask, as a closing fight of the Games. District Eleven is good: his boy is better.

That's how it should have ended.

But when Cato kills District Eleven, you can hardly hear the cannon for the thunder, and the rain doesn't even stop: Cato's scratched and hurt and tired, but Two tributes don't stop for that. He struggles back through the swamp to Eleven's tent, stolen from the Cornucopia at the start of the Games, and retrieves another sleeping bag and a few bits and pieces left of sponsor gifts, and his own gift from the Feast.

The rain doesn't stop until Cato struggles up the slope and onto the Cornucopia plain: then it turns itself off like a tap, leaving the world dripping. Cato collapses on to the grass by the lake, pulls Eleven's sopping sleeping bag over him, and falls into a deep, deep sleep.

Brutus looked round the mentors' room. He and Haymitch and Coty are the last ones there. Sometime after Cato finished off District Eleven Male, Chaff must have got up and left: Brutus never saw him go.

"I'm gonna catch a nap for a few hours," Brutus declared, out loud. He took off his headphones and stood up. "My kid's asleep, ain't gonna wake for hours."

Haymitch won his games the year after Brutus, the year of the second Quarter Quell: this is the first year Brutus ever saw him take a tribute, not one but both of them, to Final Four. District Five's kids generally die a lot sooner, too.

They may not be listening to him, and Brutus can't advise them directly - mentors can't help other-district mentors, unless their tributes are in an alliance, and no alliances survive the Final Four - but he can play fair. He pulls his Capitol phone out of his pocket, and calls up Lyme, who's senior Victor support this year. "My kid's asleep. I'm gonna eat something and crash for a few hours. Send Emory down to cover my screen and call me if anything changes."

"Got it," said Lyme, and didn't ask him why Brutus was talking out loud when he could just have ordered his own Victor, who'd come along as support, down to the mentors' room directly.

Brutus eats, showers, and sleeps for six hours. Emory sits in the hot seat and tells Brutus, quietly, that both Haymitch and Coty slipped off to the rest room to catch a nap and eat something. Brutus asked for Emory because she gets along with everyone, even Haymitch when he's sober.

Brutus sits down in the hot seat again, and waits for Cato to wake up. The sun is shining, the lake is blue mirroring the false sky above, the District Twelves are hunting for food far away, and District Five's kid is near them, not near the lake.

What wakes Cato is the cannon's boom.

District Five Female is dead.

Brutus watches as Cato springs to his feet, alert and responsive even startled out of sleep, and stand there, looking round him.

(Coty leaves. It's just Brutus and Haymitch now.)

There are plenty of funds still, and Cato needs to eat: Brutus sends him five rolls of District Two bread. He knows Cato will get the message: it's just him against the Twelves.

Cato eats two rolls - slowly, like he doesn't mean to be rushed - and only then opens the bag from the Feast. Body-armor, strong enough to turn an arrow or a knife: the same kind as District Eleven Male was wearing when Cato killed him. Wearing this armor, he's proof against District Twelve Female's archery: it negates the advantage she'll think she has in her distance weapon.

Cato strips down to put the armor on. It covers him, heel to head. It's the colour of Cato's skin, so once he's got his clothes on, it's not even immediately obvious he's wearing it.

Cato packs his three rolls of bread into Clove's small pack, and a full canteen of water. He tucks her knives away in his own clothing.

(Brutus was going to send Cato a sword, made for him personally, at this stage of the Games, if Cato survived so long: but he looks and finds, without real surprise, that the sword is no longer on the list of permitted items. The Gamemakers want Cato to fight to end with Clove's knives: they probably think that more romantic.)

Cato goes hunting.

What Brutus expects to happen, and it does, is that the Gamemakers will let Cato hunt without help for a day. If Cato doesn't find the Twelves by the end of the day, the next day the Gamemakers will drive the Twelves towards Cato.

So he doesn't worry too much as Cato methodically quarters the forest in the wrong area to find the Twelves. Tomorrow, they'll fight.

Cato sleeps under a tree. He eats a roll of bread before he sleeps, and drinks some of his water. It's the same tree where District One Female died, Brutus realises: so do the Games commentators. They think this is very romantic. Cato isn't far from the Twelves - less than a mile - but they're safely hidden inside their cave.

When all three tributes are asleep, Haymitch stands up. Brutus turned and glanced at him.

"Hell," said Haymitch, "All our kids asleep, we might as well catch a nap."

There's an edge of bravado in his voice, as if he's more frightened than he wants to appear, but Brutus doesn't see any point in challenging that. Haymitch is only one year junior to him as a Victor, and Haymitch never shows any damn respect to anyone, anyhow.

He thinks of asking Haymitch, when you asked for an alliance in the Career pack, is this what you had in mind?

But that's not the kind of question one mentor asks another, and Brutus doesn't ask.

In the rest room, there's a platter of sandwiches for three: Haymitch takes two, eats quickly, and lies down on the bed at the far end of he room. Brutus eats the other sandwiches methodically, and calls Lyme to stand watch on the Two screen if anything changes.

Haymitch snores. Brutus sleeps deep and well.

It's been a long strange bad Games, but it's nearly over, now.

Cato wakes, eats his last two rolls, and begins again his slow patient quartering of the forest. He's actually drawing away from the Twelves. The stream's gone dry. They're walking down the dry watercourse to the lake.

Brutus watches, impatient, knowing the Gamemakers will send some signal to steer Cato towards the last two he has to kill.

They do.

They send a pack of mutts.

They're like wolves, giant human-sized wolves, and they're shaped like the dead of the Games, each wearing a collar, each collar with a number, just in case the viewers are too stupid to get the point: there's even one smaller than the rest with cold brown eyes whose collar has the number 2.

Cato isn't steered to the Cornucopia: he's chased there.

He runs hard, the pack on his heels: he runs directly towards the Twelves, and District Twelve Female wastes an arrow on him. It bounces off his chest, and like that, they know about the body armor now.

The pack doesn't catch Cato, or either of the Twelves: they reach the Cornucopia and climb to the top in time, just as the Gamemakers make night fall in the Arena.

Cato should have broken District Twelve Male's neck right when he grabbed him, and that is the last time Brutus will think _shoulda woulda coulda_ about his kid. Because District Twelve Female shoots Cato in the hand, and grabs her district partner when Cato lets go. And falls, into the middle of the mutt pack.

And then Cato has his last fight, and damn, he's good: the body armor helps him at first, and all Clove's knives, but there are twenty-one mutt-wolves in the pack, and eventually, he goes down. The mutts drag his body into the Cornucopia. He's lost his hands and they've chewed at his eyes and nose. The pack flows away into the night. Cato has lost, and Brutus can only wait for the cannon. He sits there, looking at his boy's ruined face and the splintered, bloody flesh that was his hands.

Brutus has a long time to think about what just happened: the cannon doesn't fire. Cato can't live and isn't dying and the Gamesmakers sent that mutt pack to kill Cato, because they _wanted_ the Twelves to be the last two alive, because Cato was only an incidental game-piece in their planned climax.

Brutus is loyal to the Capitol and to President Snow and to his District, and no one ever said the Games would be fair.  
  
But he sits there, and he watches, as his boy cries with pain and doesn't die and doesn't die.


	13. Part Thirteen: Haymitch, District Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Haymitch knows he can't bring them both home. One of them has got to die. And as Peeta wants to give his life for Katniss, the choice is obvious. Even if it ends with two tired children squabbling about which of them gets to die first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And all the woe that moved him so  
> That he gave that bitter cry,  
> And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,  
> None knew so well as I:  
> For he who lives more lives than one  
> More deaths than one must die.

Haymitch has never been in the mentor room when it was this empty, just him and Brutus.

Brutus won't ask, Haymitch realises, slowly, too slowly: his brain feels fogged with horror.

Brutus won't ask if Haymitch can get his tributes to kill Brutus's tribute.

Brutus won't ask.

For twenty-three years, forty-six kids, he'd tried to bring them home, or tried not to care when he couldn't. He'd sat in front of the big screen on Ten or Eleven or Twelve floor, with Isabel and Chaff, and they'd watched the days of the Games with their kids gone in the bloodbath, often killed by one of Brutus's tributes, and drunk themselves silly.

District Twelve doesn't breed fighters, can't feed kids with muscle, mostly doesn't even have bright kids.

Peeta had told Haymitch, when he asked for his training to be separated from Katniss: I want her to go home. Not me. Her.

And that's enough to kill him. You don't survive the Arena unless you really, really want to.

“Why not you?” Haymitch asked. Inside, he was conscious of a terrible feeling of relief. He had permission to let Peeta die. He'd already decided that Katniss had the best chance, even if Peeta was more personable and would get more sponsors, and he could use Peeta's sponsor money for Katniss: that was up to the district mentor, and there was only one of him.

“I've got two older brothers,” Peeta said. “My parents don't need me. My mother doesn't even like me. Katniss has family who need her.”

“You're lying,” Haymitch said. He didn't know what about, but he could spot a liar.

Peeta loved Katniss.

Had loved her, he said, since their first year in school together. He told Haymitch about it, the first time he'd ever told anyone – even about how he'd burned loaves and taken a beating from his mother so he could throw the loaves to Katniss, who'd been scrounging the bakery bins for garbage earlier.

Haymitch listened – once Peeta's tongue was loosened, there was a lot to listen to. Katniss had never noticed him. Peeta had never thought ahead, never planned on a life with her, and now here he was, going into the Arena with the girl he loved, and all he could do was die for her.

“You've been in love with this girl for ten years,” Haymitch said, thinking about it, “and no one noticed?”

Peeta is still talking. Haymitch is silent. The Gamesmakers love an Arena romance, and what they want, they get: the Career tributes know how to make it look good. What if this time, what they wanted was something fresher, less predictable?

Seneca Crane has a reputation for trying out new kinds of things in his games. New is bad for Careers, good for outliers, and District Twelve are the ultimate outliers; they don't provide anything the Capitol needs or wants, not even Victors.

Katniss volunteered to save her sister, a 12-year-old girl who'd never taken tesserae, who ought to have had the smallest chance of anyone there of being Reaped. (But there was one year, only a few years ago, when everyone Reaped was twelve, and everyone knew the Capitol had fixed that.) Peeta's not Seam, he's from a wealthy family as far as District Twelve goes, he's probably never taken tesserae. What if this was planned?

Cinna told Katniss and Peeta to hold hands on their chariot. Tributes don't do that.

Cinna is a much better stylist than District Twelve usually gets.

“Ever take tesserae?” Haymitch had asked, cutting abruptly into a rambling story about Katniss singing.

“Yeah, every year since I was twelve. For everyone in my family. My mother said it was so I could contribute.”

Haymitch thinks of asking, and doesn't, if Peeta's older brothers had to take tesserae. He doubts it. So it could be that Peeta's Reaping was random. But he'd bet Primrose's Reaping wasn't, if he had anything to bet with that wasn't the Capitol's. And if the Capitol chose Primrose because they wanted Katniss to volunteer for her, then Peeta's probably wasn't either.

“I'm going to get you into the Career Pack,” Haymitch told Peeta.

“I can't be in the Career Pack,” Peeta said.

“You're going to join the Career Pack at the bloodbath. I'll fix it up with Brutus."

He'd spoken to Brutus, and Brutus to him, more often in the past three weeks than either of them had spoken to each other in the past twenty-four years.

"You're going to tell the Careers you were lying about being in love with Katniss and you can help them hunt for her. Then if they catch up with her - when they catch up with her - you do what you can, and yeah, they'll kill you, but it's the only way you can help her."

Peeta looked at Haymitch, confused, still innocent. "How are they even going to know I love Katniss?"

"Because you're going to tell everyone at your interview," Haymitch said.

Haymitch doesn't even try to tell Katniss what to do, except run from the Cornucopia. From the training stations, he reckons this is a wilderness Arena, so Katniss already knows how to survive, and she wants to live: wants it enough to kill.

Either that will be enough for Katniss to make it to the end, or it won't be. But if the Gamesmakers want to play with an Arena romance for District Twelve, they will have to keep Katniss and Peeta both alive for long enough to give the Capitol some juicy viewing.

That's as far as Haymitch planned before the Games began. He still half-expected to see them both dead in a few days. Haymitch has never had to sit in the mentor seat for more than two or three days.

Usually, only a couple of hours.

The big room with all the screens got emptier and emptier as the days went on and Katniss remained one of the centers of the narrative, and Peeta went on surviving.

The rest room next door has beds and comfortable chairs and a drinks machine and a table with a constantly-renewed supply of food. Haymitch never needed to use it before, but now he slept there sometimes when he couldn't stay awake, and he went to the sponsor lounge sometimes and tried to hustle sponsors for his kids.  
  
Mostly, though, Haymitch lived in the three screens in the mentor room, one showing what Katniss saw, one showing what Peeta saw, and the third one showing what the Gamemakers think is important. They like Katniss. They really do. That's not good, that's never good, but Katniss is still alive.

He and Chaff are both having an unexpectedly fine Games: his big Eleven kid is killing distorted colorful mutts and Katniss is ... being Katniss.

Her good qualities come across a lot better when she's struggling to survive in the wilderness. Haymitch discovered after a few days that even though he's been banned from the pupil sponsors room for years for throwing up all over their pretty, colorful buffet (his surviving tribute was then starving to death in an Arena without water, food, or fuel) Katniss is getting pupil sponsor money. It's not much, considering the funds that are rolling in for Chaff when the gamblers see what District Eleven Male can do, but ... interesting.

He can send Katniss ointment for her burns. He can send her food.

Even if they never credit her with the deaths of District One Female and District Four Female, she still killed them.

And give Katniss all the credit she deserves: after the rules change, Haymitch discovered she can lie like a Career. She's so convincing about her love for Peeta she almost fools him, and she probably fools Peeta, and both Haymitch and Peeta _know_ it's a lie.

Back home, Haymitch sees on the Games commentary, Gale Hawthorne, Katniss's best friend, has been transformed into her cousin. Peeta is to be Katniss's first true love.

Haymitch knows how the Games end. He and Brutus both know. Brutus may have watched a tribute walk up to that final fight many times, and Haymitch has only ever watched the closing hours on the big screen upstairs, but both of them know what's going to happen.

District Two Male will kill Peeta. Then District Two Male and Katniss will fight.

Then Katniss will be going home to her little sister, either alive and as well as any Victor ever Is, or in a coffin, dead from District Two Female's knives that District Two Male's carrying now. That's what he and Brutus both thought was going to happen. That's what should have happened in any other Games.

The pack of wolf-mutts chewed up Cato's hands and face. The Capitol cameras focussed right in so he and Brutus and all the watching audience could all see Cato being eaten. The mutts have hands, but they don't use their hands to get Cato's body-armor off and finish him: they drag the bleeding, ruined body into the Cornucopia, and flow off into the night.

The night won't end til Cato dies. Cato will take a long, long time to die. Katniss could kill him – her second true kill of the Games – but she and Peeta are huddling together on top of the Cornucopia, scared of the mutt-pack coming back, waiting for Cato to die.

Somewhere in the long night, Haymitch realises he can't think of Cato as District Two Male any more. He doesn't know when he stopped.

Brutus is just sitting, big and still and silent, his eyes on the screen where the cameras show Cato dying by inches.

Haymitch looks at his sponsor funds. They're all but empty – he sent them that lavish meal, a reward for Katniss's lovetalk and kisses, and food is ruinously expensive so late in the Games.

Also, he cannot think how he could signal her to kill Cato now. Send her an arrow? Would she understand that? Haymitch isn't sure she would.

Finally, slowly, Katniss seems to get the message that she needs to act, to kill, to behave like a Victor. With Peeta's help – she doesn't get down from the Cornucopia to do it, so her shot is from a strange angle as she leans over the edge – she sends her last silver arrow to kill Cato.

Brutus's screen goes dark.

But he doesn't get up and leave. He turns his chair round, to face Haymitch's screen.

Maybe this is something that always happens, at the end of the Games, Haymitch thinks: and then, no: because at the end of the Games with only two mentors left, when one tribute kills the other mentor's tribute, that would be the end. Trumpets. The Victor.

There are two tributes left in the Arena. The Hunger Games have only one Victor.

Seneca Crane may need to tell Katniss and Peeta that out loud in the Arena, but down in the mentors' room, Haymitch knows it already.

To finish off the last 17 days of enjoyment, the Capitol wants to see Katniss kill Peeta.

Haymitch thinks he would be sick, if he had anything in his stomach to be sick with.

The door opens, and Haymitch looks up, half-expecting to see Capitol Peacekeepers come to arrest him for what he was thinking about the Gamesmakers just then, about the Capitol audience who want this last emotional climax to their juicy story of two outliers who loved each other and had a beautiful, tragic, doomed romance, scripted for them in the 74th Hunger Games by Seneca Crane.

But it isn't. Not Peacekeepers. Mentors.

Chaff and Harvest come in: Chaff drops his hand on Haymitch's shoulder as he passes, as they too turn their chairs round to face the District Twelve screens. The door behind them has no sooner swung shut than it opens again: Lyme and Artemisia. Lyme stands between Brutus's chair and Artemisia's, one hand on either shoulder: she catches Haymitch's eye and nods, solemnly.

Isabel and Lambert – Haymitch hardly knows Lambert, he never gets drunk at the Games – Cecilia and Coty: Sealie and Tyde: Beetee: even, last of all, Precious and Malachite. Fifteen mentors: the room is almost as full as it is during the bloodbath.

Haymitch looks round, looks back at the screens. His two tributes are sitting by the lake, in the sunshine, in the beautiful box of their Arena. Fourteen mentors at his back. They all know that in a few minutes, he's going to see one of his tributes kill the other to end the Games, and they're here to be with him when it happens.

Beetee gets up. He walks over to Haymitch's console, and does something to it. The sound cuts out in Haymitch's headphones, and Chaff reaches out with his hand and pulls them off.

Peeta is speaking. “What are they waiting for?” He's got a leg wound, and it's bleeding badly. Nothing the Capitol healers can't fix.

“I don't know,” Katniss says.

Katniss gets up, apparently because she's spotted one of her silver arrows in the grass. She's still carrying her silver bow.

Claudius Templesmith's voice booms out, as if announcing a Feast, not the Victor:

“Greetings to the final contestants of the 74th Hunger Games. The earlier revision has been revoked - “

Haymitch swallowed, and fixed his eyes resolutely on his three screens. He's watched them for seventeen days: he can keep watching them now. He's grateful for the mentors at his back, but he can't look at them. He can't look away.

“If you think about it,” Peeta said, “it's not that surprising.” He has a knife in his belt. He pushes himself slowly to his feet, painfully, and pulls the knife out.

Katniss's bow is drawn and the last silver arrow poised to fire.

Peeta shook his head. He threw his knife into the lake.

Katniss dropped her bow.

“No,” Peeta said. “Do it.” He's very lame now, stumbling, but he made it over to Katniss and stooped to pick up her bow and arrow and hand them back to her.

“I can't,” Katniss said. She's speaking so quietly the microphone implant barely picks it up.

“I won't,” she adds.

“Do it,” says Peeta. “Before they send those mutts back. I don't want to die like Cato.”

Katniss is suddenly, abruptly angry: to push the bow back at him, and shouted, her voice cracking, “Then _you_ shoot me! You shoot me and go home and _live_ with it!”

Haymitch has never really felt part of the tenuous, invisible comradeship between Victors. He knows it's there: he's seen even District One act on it sometimes. But not in the mentors' room. Not when they're watching the Games from the mentors' seats.

He can drink with Chaff and Isabel, he can tell dark jokes in the sponsors' lounge, but no one else is the only Victor for their district, no one else has to mentor alone every single Games, no one else always, always sees their tributes die, every year. No one else that he knows of has lost their entire family and can't be forced into providing services to Capitol sponsors: only District Two Victors and Haymitch are never seen at Capitol parties dished up for the sponsors to taste. And District Two Victors have their own deal.

But settling in the room like a dark weight of sorrow, Haymitch can feel the other mentors now: they all know that the ones who die are the lucky ones, that living with the Games is never over.

Peeta sat down – collapses – and ripped the rough bandage off his leg wound. It was bleeding before but it's a river now, a river of blood into Arena earth and Peeta will die and once Peeta is dead, Katniss is the Victor.

“No, you can't kill yourself,” Katniss says.

“You're not leaving me here alone,” Katniss says.

She's trying to rebandage his leg. He's trying to tell her that one of them has to die and he very much wants it to be him. These are two conflicting goals, and they're not listening to each other: two tired kids fighting over who gets to die first.

Peeta's going to win, Haymitch can see: he is bleeding out, and Katniss can't stop it.

Peeta manages to stand up. The effort only makes him bleed harder. He reaches down to Katniss, who scrambles to her feet. She seems to have thought of something: she's fumbling at her pouch.

She pulled out the nightlock berries. Haymitch hears a sharp intake of breath: it seems to come from either side of the room, as much from his own throat.

If Katniss eats nightlock, she'll be dead faster than Peeta.

Haymitch sees his whole future reworking itself like a mine explosion reworks the ground above. Not Katniss and her family in the Victors' Village with him, but Peeta, lonely Peeta whose family hate him. He'd been expecting Katniss to mentor with him, Katniss to share the years ahead with him, Katniss bright and furious and fast and loved. He doesn't think he'll have to explain much about being a mentor to Peeta. He wonders how much help he can get with drugs to keep Peeta calmed down.

Katniss divides the nightlock berries, and hands the other handful to Peeta.

Peeta kisses her.

Haymitch realises, too late, what they're going to do. His idiot tributes, they're _both_ going to kill themselves.

“On the count of three,” Katniss says.

“The count of three,” Peeta agrees.

They turn, press their backs against each other's, reach out with their free hand to hold the other's hand.

Haymitch can still feel the room, the mentors, the dark support and understanding, failing, fraying. They all know: each Games has to have a Victor. District partners have tried joint suicide before: Katniss is killing her mother, her sister, Peeta's mother and father and brothers. More people than she's killed in the Arena will die because of this.

They've put the berries in their mouths, when Claudius Templesmith booms out “Stop! Stop!”

And both of them, as quickly as if they'd rehearsed it, are spitting the berries out, unbroken, harmless.

Haymitch stands up. He turns round. He meets their collective gaze.

There is no sympathy or understanding or support in their faces now. Not even in Chaff's, or Isabel's. Behind him, blaring out across the mentors' room, Claudius Templesmith is announcing District Twelve's two tributes joint Victors of the Hunger Games.

Haymitch has cheated. He can read that in their faces. Somehow, Haymitch has cheated.

They might not hold that against his tributes – his Victors – but they'll hold it against him, for as long as they all live and the Hunger Games are played in Panem. He cheated. He got both his kids out alive.

Haymitch pulled a smile out of his guts and wrapped it on to his face. “Wish I could stay,” he said breezily. “But I've got an appointment.” He smirked at them all, and set out to cross the crowded room.

None of them get up to make way for him. All of them stare at him. None of them speak to him.

Behind him, he supposed Beetee had done something to silence his console: the door opens, and behind it is a squad of Peacekeepers. Their leader takes a step forward into the mentors' room. If he's surprised by seeing it full of Victors, he doesn't show it.

“You're wanted,” the Peacekeeper says. “President Snow.”

“You know,” Haymitch said, putting on his most disrespectful grin, “I guessed he was going to want to see me. Let's go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to buy Haymitch a stiff drink.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is now complete.


End file.
